Discrepencies between colmap in Docker (v3.10) and colmap from ubuntu repository (v3.7)

[romaintha]

Hello,
I have been running a reconstruction locally on my ubuntu which uses Colmap installed from Ubuntu repository (colmap version 3.7). I am able to get a good reconstruction of my scene.
Using the same parameters, on the colmap docker image (tag latest, colmap version 3.10-dev), the mapping stage does not output the right reconstruction at all.
At first I thought it might be due to some of the stages run on GPU, so I tried to disable GPU everywhere, but it did not help.
Is there anything that is dramatically different between the 3.7 version and the 3.10?

[sarlinpe]

Similar issues have been reported in #2427 and #2271. @ahojnnes we'll need to look into this soon.

@romaintha if you have time, it'd be good to isolate which stage causes the issue, for example by running of 3.10 with a database (features and matches) generated by 3.7, and conversely.

[romaintha]

@sarlinpe , I did a bit of testing and here are my findings.

Full (feature extraction, matching and mapping) 3.7 (ubuntu 22.04) reconstruction

Full 3.10 (docker latest) reconstruction:
No sparse reconstruction at all

Feature extraction 3.7 and matching + mapping 3.10 (docker latest):

It looks decent but if I look in details, the results is way poorer than with the full 3.7 reconstruction since some camera extrinsic are quite wrong

Feature extraction 3.10, matching 3.7, mapping 3.10:

This one looks very similar to the full 3.7 reconstruction.

So according to these tests, it seems that doing the matching in 3.7 solves the problem .

One more question: is there a way to get a built docker image with 3.7? I can't find the docker tag with 3.7 sadly

[SharkWipf]

In the Nerfstudio discord, I've seen several cases reported that point at COLMAP 3.8 (so not 3.7) as being the last stable version, with significant regressions on 3.9.
In several cases, successfully found poses go down from like 200 on 3.8 to 2 on 3.9.

One more question: is there a way to get a built docker image with 3.7? I can't find the docker tag with 3.7 sadly

@romaintha
While not a direct answer, and not directly applicable to docker unless you make your own container image, you can still install 3.7 and 3.8 from conda-forge.

[ahojnnes]

@romaintha Is it possible for you to share the input images so we can investigate the issue?

[romaintha]

@ahojnnes I can't share the data publicly. If you give me an email I can send you a way to download the data