Author: Yao Yao
RapidSFM is a free web service for photogrammetry-based 3D reconstruction. Currently it supports:
Surface reconstruction, mesh refinement and texture generation are to be implemented in the future.
All the math-intensive parts of the algorithms are fully GPU-accelerated with Nvidia CUDA. This makes RapidSFM ~2 orders of magnitude faster than most other (free or commercial) software. The significantly reduced cost allows me to provide it as a free service.
Note that the computation is done in a remote worker (my PC or an AWS GPU instance), so your input data, including the images, needs to be uploaded to the cloud and further transfered to the worker for further processing. Images uploaded are cached for up to three days, to avoid repeated uploading when restarting of a task is needed, or different settings for the same input images are attempted. Your data may be used for debugging in case of failure, and will not be used in any other ways until further notice.
Currently supported image formats are JPEG, AVIF and HEIF. JPEG XL will be added in the future.
Currently the service has a set of websocket-based internal APIs. Migration to http-based RESTful open APIs is planned.
Currently the service can be accessed via a simple GUI client (v0.1.8) for Windows. See change log for changes and a simple guide is available. Third-party (free or commercial) clients are welcomed when the APIs becomes open.
Please post your questions in r/RapidSFM in reddit.