Add instructions to install wheels from pypi

[johnwlambert]

Hi Mihai, thanks for your great work making this interface.

I got a bit sick of building COLMAP and pycolmap on different machines, so I decided to just make standalone wheels for your library. They should be in pypi now.

I'm adding some instructions to the readme about how to use it. Can you try installing the wheels using these instructions to see if they work for you?

[sarlinpe]

Hi John,
This is great, thanks a lot! Installing from pypi works for me.

We often also need to run the COLMAP executable, e.g. the triangulator, so we would anyway need to build COLMAP. Is it possible to include the executable in the wheel? This would simplify a lot of installs. Alternatively, we could provide a Python interface to all commands in COLMAP/src/exe/. That is cleaner but requires more work.

[johnwlambert]

Hi @skydes, good to hear it's working.

I believe to include the executable functionality in the wheel, we would need to wrap the following commands in Pybind:

int RunAutomaticReconstructor(int argc, char** argv);
int RunBundleAdjuster(int argc, char** argv);
int RunColorExtractor(int argc, char** argv);
int RunMapper(int argc, char** argv);
int RunHierarchicalMapper(int argc, char** argv);
int RunPointFiltering(int argc, char** argv);
int RunPointTriangulator(int argc, char** argv);
int RunRigBundleAdjuster(int argc, char** argv);

Maybe we can use the interface defined from https://github.com/colmap/colmap/blob/dev/src/exe/sfm.cc.

[mihaidusmanu]

Thanks a lot for your contribution!

I will merge this and create an issue to track the wrapping of colmap exe utilities.

[farhadinima75]

Hi there.
first of all, thanks for the great interface and useful wheel library.
is it possible to run sift feature detection on CUDA enabled device just like colmap?
thanks in advance.