Anyone using Datumate Software?

I have a sales rep coming in to do a field demo this month. Looks promising.

I saw a demo and you either need a ladder, a drone, a tall building or a rod to really make it work well.

The program does not make a model, you can only look from the perspective in your images. While some features will be easily extracted from the 5-6' height of the average person, other features need the height or you will be taking a million shots.

I figure a camera on a rod with wires coming into a laptop would work well. You could then review the images at each location and move along when you have the good shots. It will not be as quick as running around like the paparazzi, but it could be cool.

Let us know how it goes.

Looks like it's going to really give Trimble some serious competition. Using a high-resolution consumer-grade digital camera is a LOT cheaper than the factory-calibrated system Trimble uses. Suddenly it's gone from major bucks to easily afforded by a single Surveyor.

Drones needed for the examples shown, but there's a whole lot of applications that can be done without a drone/UAV. I have used cherry pickers instead of drones with great success ... and that was 15-20 years ago! Software I used was my own, but it was MS-DOS ... not windows.

I wonder what this package costs?

Something on the lines of an industrial grade selfie-stick would do the trick. Bluetooth button controls the shutter.

$6000 plus $1000 per year maintenance subscription.

25 ft fiberglass pole w/gimble, bluetooth comm

Sales rep at the NJSPLS conference described using a 25 ft. fiberglass pole with gimble mount for camera and bluetooth connection to iphone or tablet for viewing and shooting. His example of a retail store parking lot was reputedly done using that method with good results. Obviously ideal for drone. The cherry-picker truck may be too awkward with numerous setups.

Interesting concept. I see plenty of applications if carefully done.;-)

Thanks and regards,
Mike Moran

Datumate is truly powerful CRTP software. it does what it says it's going to do, i have demo'ed their product.
that was a wonderful thirty day time of it. if your company wants into CRTP, then Datumate is a wise choice

We are going to use it in conjunction with Pix4D on a project next month. I'll let you know how it works! The plan is that Pix4D will give us the point cloud and the model but it lacks good ability to define hard breaklines on curbs, etc. Our plan is to make the hard breaklines in Datumate then combine the data in CAD.

We have compared traditionally located site features to those located with low altitude orthomosaics from Pix4D (drone and ground collected) and we can pick the center of manholes, valves, signs, and other site features usually within 2-6cm directly from the photos in CAD.

Interesting software! Wasn't there something roughly similar that was online? Maybe an Autocad product??

Andy

Photo-Based Point Clouds

&g http://www.datumate.com/
>
> Saw them at the LSAW conference, and it looked like a powerful tool.

Funny how this board works...I started a thread a couple of weeks ago with "Photo-Based Point Clouds" and didn't get feedback beyond Josh from Atlanta's advice on Agisoft's Photoscan software.

We've been sifting through the current crop of lower cost CRP software and still have many questions too...What kinds of jobs have you been using CRP on? Setup?...

Datumate Datugram 3D $7,000

Agisoft Photoscan $3,499

Photomodeler Scanner $2,495

Pix4Dmapper $8,700

Autodesk ReCap, Revit, etc. (included with Infrastructure Design Suite Premium subscriptions)

Trimble Business Center Advanced Terrestrial Photogrammetry w/ S6 Vision images

The way they use the terms "Geodetic Mapping" and "Geodetic Accuracy" to represent measuring the face of a building seems odd.

What the heck is "Geodetic Accuracy"?

Photo-Based Point Clouds

Take a look at iWitness photogrammetric software. That's what I use to teach with at LSU. Primary author is Dr. Clive Frazier from Melbourne, Australia and he has published extensively on the effectiveness, mathematical foundation, and practical applications of his family of software. It's excellent quality software and is based on published scientific research - the real thing.

123d catch?

Photo-Based Point Clouds

> Take a look at iWitness photogrammetric software. That's what I use to teach with at LSU. Primary author is Dr. Clive Frazier from Melbourne, Australia and he has published extensively on the effectiveness, mathematical foundation, and practical applications of his family of software. It's excellent quality software and is based on published scientific research - the real thing.

Worth a look for sure.
Thank you.

it does not say what types of cameras/lenses are required for the system. some lenses have distortions introduced into the images depending on the f-stop used during photography.

i wonder if these distortions will be taken of in the software. can someone using the demo confirm this?

thanks.

Photo-Based Point Clouds

😉

> it does not say what types of cameras/lenses are required for the system. some lenses have distortions introduced into the images depending on the f-stop used during photography.

There's a 40+ minute video on YouTube that walks through a demo. It was created not by Datumate but by a vendor, and in it they address the camera issue a bit. They recommend a high-pixel-count (20mp or so) camera with a fixed-focus lens. Their example is a Samsung model that sells for around $450.

They do have a calibration procedure for the particular camera that you are going to be using.

After watching a vendor video of the DatuGram 3D software, one thing that strikes me is that the level of effort required to accurately (as defined by the capability of the technology) locate any point in the photos is very high. Each discrete point has to be identified in multiple photos and the resulting solution statistics checked for acceptability.

This would be fine for situations in which the desired points aren't accessible to field instruments (e.g. reflectorless total station) or can't be identified at the time of the field work, but for most topo situations in which I'm involved, it looks like it'd be faster and more accurate to measure the points directly in the field.

It's interesting technology, but it's not going to replace field surveying or laser scanning. If there's a place for it in my toolbox, I haven't found it yet.