Structure from Motion using video from my phone camera

Introduction. In my last post, I showed how I had extracted frames from satellite-derived video to build a 3D model of a mine from space. In this post, I show a similar workflow for phone camera: take a video of an object (some times a lot easier than numerous frames although lower quality) and make a 3D model using Agisoft Photoscan.

Video to images. (this part is repeated from the last post). The main generic challenge for SfM from video is to extract the video frames and prepare them for the SfM. The SfM part is no different from what my group has been doing for a while with Agisoft Photoscan. I used MATLAB to do the video processing. The script is here: readplanetvid.m. The main code bits include:
PlanetObj = VideoReader(videoname); %make a video object from an MP4 file
vidWidth = PlanetObj.Width; %get the width
vidHeight = PlanetObj.Height; %and height

mov = struct('cdata',zeros(vidHeight,vidWidth,3,'uint8'),...
'colormap',[]); %set up a MATLAB structure to contain the video

k = 1;
while hasFrame(PlanetObj)
mov(k).cdata = readFrame(PlanetObj); %pull out the frames one at a time from the MP4 object and put them in the mov
k = k+1;
end

step = floor(k/number_of_frames) %determine how many frames to skip each time to get the desired number
for i = 1:step:(k-1)
framepart = sprintf('_frame_%06d.png', i);
filename = strcat(foldername,'/',projectname,framepart);
imwrite(mov(i).cdata, filename) %easy to write the frame out as a png file
end


Video of a rock sample in my backyard. I took a short video of a piece of obsidian on a table with my Samsung J3. The nice thing about it was that I could gather a large number of views around the sample with relative ease. From that video, I extracted 150 frames, for example see below

I ran the files through the Agisoft Photoscan sequence of alignment (high), build dense cloud (medium), build mesh (medium), and build texture (medium). Here are a few screen captures of the result:

This one shows a somewhat complex background, but nicely indicates the path of the camera too.

And here it is with a trim to only show the sample on the table: