Direct software funding
We focused on four interrelated themes for funding direct software development: upstream libraries, performance, ecosystem resilience, and security. A pleasant surprise in the work was the cases where performance and security worked hand in hand. But first: memory!
Headwaters Project, OpenMVS Texturing Module
With the principle that we support the upstream libraries that support us, we initiated the Headwaters Project in 2025 to begin that process.
Brett put it best by saying:
The Headwaters Project is a series of initiatives to support the ecosystem of programs, utilities, libraries, etc. that power the OpenDroneMap ecosystem. This means giving back to and supporting the projects that we rely upon, in order to make Open Source development more sustainable.
As far as critical libraries, the primary memory bottleneck for most OpenDroneMap processing is the texturing step where we take the individual photos from a dataset and “paint” the pixels back on a 3D mesh representing the scene. MVS-Texturing is the library we use for this work, and while it is quite a clever piece of software, it wasn’t designed to do the scale of datasets that are commonly processed with OpenDroneMap. It also isn’t as actively developed as it once was.
Developer Lead
In order to solve this problem and improve another upstream library, we engaged Dan Cernea of OpenMVS to replace MVS-texturing with a new OpenMVS texturing module that should both improve the quality of model texturing and reduce memory footprint. This is also expected to include improvements to texturing in cases where there are moving objects in the scene. Development work is ongoing but well underway, with basic functionality in place for mesh texturing with active development on the orthophoto weighted version.
Approach
We describe the approach here and development progress we document on an ongoing basis here.
Cost
Total cost for this project is $32,000.
Timeline
We were hoping to have this project out the door in 2025, but it’s been a combined research and development project, so it’s taken a bit longer. Basic implementation is now in place. Orthophoto weighted portion is now well under way, and we expect a testable development branch before the end of first quarter and likely in the next few weeks.