v0.5.0

The macOS application of 0.5.0 did not start on macOS 15 and is not attached here: download 0.5.1, with the fix, from v0.5.1.

What's new in 0.5.0

Orthophotos at full resolution, and patches

• Large orthophotos and DEMs open from a reduced copy and, when you zoom in, the visible part is read again from the file up to the full resolution: the 45,000 x 46,000 px orthophoto of a tell opens in under a second and shows its 1.35 cm pixels in a fraction of a second.
• Assign photos to an area (patches, as in Metashape): draw an area on the orthophoto (Patch in the drawing bar) or use a selected polygon; the photos that frame it are listed best first, each with the area as it would come out. Use only the chosen photos or every photo but them, on the DEM (a true orthophoto) or on the ground around the area: trees, vehicles and people come out as the photo shows them instead of swirls over a DEM that does not fit them, and holes of the DEM are filled. Only the patch is drawn again, with the overviews of that window (2 s on a tell instead of a minute); patches stay in the project as a layer and apply to later builds; an orthophoto of another program is copied first and never changed.
• The same patch corrects the texture of the model, and the lasso in the 3D view offers Correggi la texture di queste facce. Command line: ppg patch.
• Large orthophotos are built tile by tile, in parallel, with overviews (a tell at 1.35 cm/px in 4-6 minutes); cells seen only at grazing angles stay transparent instead of smearing the photos.

Cleaning, confidence and cropping

• Confidence of the dense cloud and of the model (how many depth maps confirm each point or vertex), shown in the 3D view and kept in PLY and LAS files.
• Cleaning of the dense cloud (confidence, isolated points, detached groups, classes, colour), of the model (unseen faces, detached pieces, stretched triangles, holes, smoothing, decimation) and of the tie points (gradual selection), with the points to remove shown in red first.
• Crop with a box or a polygon drawn on the orthophoto or the DEM: DEM, orthophoto, model and dense cloud exported cut, or cut in the project with the originals kept as versions. Files of other programs are never changed.
• Photos kept online only by Dropbox, iCloud or OneDrive are detected before every step that reads the photos, with Ricollega foto to another copy (e.g. an external disk).

Excavation records and point classes

• One site per project; drawn units and spot heights carry the fields of pyunitastratigrafiche and pyarchinit_quote, are saved with the project and published to PyArchInit once.
• Segment Anything 2.1 by tap, box, area or the whole orthophoto in tiles, with corrections; PyTorch for the graphics card (Apple GPU, CUDA) installed on demand.
• Point classes shown, hidden and corrected with a lasso in the 3D view; a trainable point classifier with reusable models; one class per stratigraphic unit, with statistics.
• DEM (a DTM from the ground alone), orthophoto, mesh, sections and exports from chosen point classes.

Engine

• Mesh from the depth maps (TSDF fusion); camera optimisation constrained by the control points (ppg optimize).
• Align and merge chunks by markers, photos in common or overlapping clouds (ppg align-chunks, ppg merge-chunks).
• Versions of the dense cloud, model, DEM and orthophoto, kept to compare them (DEM differences in the view).

Textures and Metashape

• Readable textures: for terrain seen from the air the texture of the model is its orthophoto, with cells of their own for walls and sections (adaptive orthophoto mapping); models keep their colours and texture through cleaning, cropping and confidence.
• The Metashape import brings the model with its colours and texture, the internal DEM when the exported one is missing or empty, and File > Importa > Modello e texture dal progetto Metashape adds them to projects imported before.

Interface

• A splash with a progress bar while the application starts (the window in about 1.3 s); projects open with a progress card and the photo thumbnails load in the background.
• Points, faces or pixels in brackets next to every product; adjustable point size; millions of points on the graphics card.
• Sections at an automatic scale with a readable preview; contour lines with a suggested interval, simplification and smoothing; the live QGIS link through a GeoPackage.

Fixes

• The DEM view is lit from the north-west, like the exported hillshade (the relief could look inverted).
• A fork after a PyArchInit (SpatiaLite) database no longer crashes or hangs the process.
• Numbers are read in the C locale after Qt starts (the IFC preview was empty on an Italian macOS).
• Depth maps of imported Metashape projects; the sam extra installs huggingface_hub.
• Chunk alignment by points without an initial position keeps the alternative fits of a symmetric scene (a rectangular trench could be registered turned by 180 degrees).

Desktop applications for macOS (Apple Silicon) and Windows are attached below; with pip: pip install -U pyarchinit-photogrammetry. Documentation: README, interface, API.