Imagery processing and Structure from Motion (SfM)

Topic 2: Structure from Motion

Published

September 9, 2026

UAS imagery processing

Outline

What comes home from a flight: images, flight log, ground control
Products: orthomosaic, DSM and DTM, point cloud, textured model
Exterior and interior orientation, markers, coordinate reference systems
The Agisoft Metashape workflow step by step, and the settings that matter
Exports, the processing report, and which accuracy number to quote

Lecture

Lecture Slides: UAS Imagery Processing

Supplemental materials

Structure from Motion demo: interactive flight over a terrain, showing how overlap and flying height decide which ground points are reconstructed
Agisoft Metashape user manual, Professional edition 2.3.2 (Agisoft LLC 2025)
Agisoft tutorials: orthomosaic and DEM generation with GCPs, point cloud classification and DTM, DEM-based measurements
Introduction to Structure from Motion Photogrammetry, lectures and demos from the OpenTopography short course at GSA 2021 (OpenTopography 2021), with the YouTube playlist
Multi-View Stereo: A Tutorial, the standard reference on dense matching (Furukawa and Hernández 2015)

Assignment

Assignment 2B: Geoprocessing UAS imagery in Agisoft Metashape: process the Lake Wheeler imagery from photos to an orthomosaic, a DSM, and a processing report, then explain the report and its accuracy figures. See the assignment page for the data, the step-by-step settings, the report requirements, and the due date.

References

Agisoft LLC. 2025. Agisoft Metashape User Manual: Professional Edition, Version 2.3. https://www.agisoft.com/pdf/metashape-pro_2_3_en.pdf.

Furukawa, Yasutaka, and Carlos Hernández. 2015. “Multi-View Stereo: A Tutorial.” Foundations and Trends in Computer Graphics and Vision 9 (1-2): 1–148. https://doi.org/10.1561/0600000052.

OpenTopography. 2021. Introduction to Structure from Motion Photogrammetry. Geological Society of America 2021 short course, lectures and demos. https://opentopography.org/workshops/GSA2021.