• Journal of the Korean Society of Surveying, Geodesy, Photogrammetry and Cartography
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• v.37 no.6
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• pp.427-434
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• 2019

In the present study, we assessed the parallel computing performance of Agisoft Metashape for orthomosaic generation, which can implement aerial triangulation, generate a three-dimensional point cloud, and make an orthomosaic based on SfM (Structure from Motion) technology. Due to the nature of SfM, most of the time is spent on Align photos, which runs as a relative orientation, and Build dense cloud, which generates a three-dimensional point cloud. Metashape can parallelize the two processes by using multi-cores of CPU (Central Processing Unit) and GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). An orthomosaic was created from large UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) images by six conditions combined by three parallel methods (CPU only, GPU only, and CPU + GPU) and two operating systems (Windows and Linux). To assess the consistency of the results of the conditions, RMSE (Root Mean Square Error) of aerial triangulation was measured using ground control points which were automatically detected on the images without human intervention. The results of orthomosaic generation from 521 UAV images of 42.2 million pixels showed that the combination of CPU and GPU showed the best performance using the present system, and Linux showed better performance than Windows in all conditions. However, the RMSE values of aerial triangulation revealed a slight difference within an error range among the combinations. Therefore, Metashape seems to leave things to be desired so that the consistency is obtained regardless of parallel methods and operating systems.