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pyarchinit-photogrammetry

Open-source photogrammetry for archaeology and heritage BIM, integrated with PyArchInit.

From photos to georeferenced point clouds, meshes, DEMs and orthophotos, with the tools an excavation needs: coded targets and ground control, sections and plans, contour lines and volumes, stratigraphic units and spot heights with the fields of PyArchInit, pottery profiles, point classes, Segment Anything 2.1, IFC export. A desktop application, a command line (ppg) and a Python library on the same engine, running on the CPU (Apple Silicon included). GPL-2.0-or-later.

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  • Installation

    The desktop application for macOS and Windows, or pip install on macOS, Windows and Linux (x86-64 and ARM).

  • Tutorials

    Step by step, with the demo project and with real photos of a tell.

  • Desktop interface

    Every menu, pane and tool of the window.

  • Python API

    Documents, chunks and the workflow in scripts, also inside the window (Console Python).

  • PyArchInit

    Orthophotos, DEMs, models, units, spot heights and sections into a PyArchInit database.

  • Plugins

    Add menu actions, commands and export formats; the plugin repository.

The DEM view with units from PyArchInit, contour lines and a section

What it does

  • Reconstruction: alignment (COLMAP), depth maps (CPU, PatchMatch in Rust, or COLMAP/OpenMVS), dense cloud with confidence, mesh (Poisson, height field or depth map fusion), texture, DEM and orthophoto (true orthophoto, seamless blending, patches, at full resolution even on large tells).
  • Georeferencing: ArUco/AprilTag targets found automatically, ground control and check points, scale bars, camera optimisation on the control, report with the errors.
  • Archaeology: sections and plans to scale (SVG/DXF), contour lines, cut and fill volumes, relief visualisations (sky-view factor, openness, multi-hillshade), stratigraphic units and spot heights drawn on the orthophoto, proposals of units and relationships, Munsell colours, pottery profiles from a turntable, stones and features with SAM.
  • Exchange: PyArchInit (SQLite/SpatiaLite and PostgreSQL/PostGIS), QGIS live, QField, IFC 4, I3S scene layers, COPC, 3D Tiles, glTF; projects of Metashape, WebODM and Photo3D imported.

Status

Version 1.0 - desktop application, command line and library. The source, the issues and the releases are on GitHub; the plan of the next versions is in the roadmap.