A few years ago, I have posted an inquiry about how to use ODM specifically to build textured 3D models of biological specimens from photographs. Thanks to help from community but in particular from @smathermather and @pierotofy we were able to get started on doing open-source photogrammetry.
This resulted in two peer-reviewed papers in biology journals (they are open-access):
https://doi.org/10.1093/iob/obad024 (focused on how to acquire the images with some basic processing steps)
https://doi.org/10.1242/bio.062126 (the full workflow as a 3D Slicer extension).
We also published a new 3D Slicer extension called Photogrammetry ( GitHub - SlicerMorph/SlicerPhotogrammetry ) as part of our SlicerMorph morphometrics ecosystem. It integrates SAM model for masking, which drastically improved the geometric accuracy of the 3D models we get out of pipeline. Current module looks like this:
We are about to finish an updated version of the extension that allows doing photogrammetry out of videos (with the integration of Samurai video tracking model). If you are curious, it is available as a separate branch ( GitHub - SlicerMorph/SlicerPhotogrammetry at PhotoMasking-full-history ) that you will need to manually install. With this new version, we will split the video- and photomasking as two separate modules, and ODM gets its own module to process the masked frames from either of them.
At this point we chose to support the Photogrammety extension only on Linux, due to the number of dependencies required to run it. It works really well through our other project, [MorphoCloud](https://morphocloud.org), which allows interactive GPU accelerated remote desktop sessions on public cloud server Jetstream2. With these instances we can process datasets with 300-400 images in about 45 minutes and get the model shown above and users don’t even have to install a thing!
Anyways, i wanted to take this opportunity to acknowledge the great tool ODM is and its helpful community. Clearly this is not what most of you work on, but still helped us. Thank you again for making your tools freely available.