It is important to understand that SfM techniques, while highly effective, have certain limitations in the kinds of imagery that can be effectively processed into point clouds. The techniques are dependent upon finding matches between subsequent images and thus can have trouble processing images that are smooth, are missing the camera's embedded Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF) information, or are from cell phone cameras.
EXIF tags are a metadata format for images. Stored in these tags are often the camera settings, camera type, lens type, and other information relevant to SfM extraction.
We will start processing an image series into a point cloud with a photo series that we know largely works, but as you experiment with ...
