as a new I got following error when starting up: "The shared folder 'curt' could not be set up: Shared folder path '/home/curt' does not exist on the host."
I can go further and start the virtual machine up, but then I have a (small) issue:
- my MAC keyboard is an AZERTY - so not easy but can work with it
The rests works perfectly! I see the amazing cornfield and can zoom in/out and use cursors to move around - beautiful quality
Yessss! I want to go ahead!!! I feel like a boy in a candy shop - but still with no wallet to buy anything ;-)
Thanks for the kind words! For a lot of image sets, when you draw the original images together as full original images, the details can really pop. For our use-case here this is important because we are hunting for anomalies in the images (evidence of invasive plants ... often clusters of colored berries, or signs of a vines coiling around a tree trunk, or particularly shaped seed head ... generally things that shouldn't be there.)
Shared folders: virtualbox has the ability to share folders with the host computer. This way you can keep your big image sets on the host and don't need to copy them over to the virtual machine for processing. This lets you keep the virtual machine disk image as trim as possible and not waste too many extra resources. When the virtual machine is powered down you can go to "settings" and then "shared folders". You should see the /home/curt folder setup which obviously wouldn't exist on your pc, but if you mimic that setup with your own path to your images folder, then you can make that appear on the virtual machine. Once you have your own folder setup, you can go ahead and delete /home/curt ... this is something I can't setup ahead of time unfortunately because everyone's computer layout is going to be different. There is a *ton* of online help for oracle virtualbox, so if you run into a question about the virtual machine setup for your particular situation, google is probably going to be a better resource than me.
Once you have your own shared folder setup properly and reboot your virtual machine you can click on "activities" in the upper left corner and then open up the file browser. Your shared folder should show up with the name "sf_something". From the terminal (command line) this will be located under /media/sf_something You will need to know this later when you process your own image sets.
I don't know anything about azerty keyboard layouts ... if there is something straightforward I can do with my project code to make things easier I'm willing to take a look at it.
If you want to reprocess the test data set yourself to see that in action (it will take some time) you could do these steps.
1. from the command line or file browser, remove the entire ~/Source/ImageAnalysis/scripts/ztest/ImageAnalysis directory. For each image set you process, the tools create a subdirectory called ImageAnalysis inside the images folder and all the processing files are stored there. The original images aren't touched. So you can quickly wipe this entire subdirectory to clean up or restart.
2. reprocess the test data set:
cd ~/Source/ImageAnalysis/scripts
./process.py ztest
<wait for a while>
3. when it finishes, look at the results:
./explorer.py ztest
A quick note if you get through all of this and want to jump ahead to your own data sets. These tools know about a few (mostly dji) cameras that I have had a chance to use myself. But if your images are taken with a different variant, the processing script might bomb out at the setup stage. At that point there is a script to help setup a new camera. Let me know if you encounter this and I can walk you through that, or if you send me a sample picture I may be able to add the camera from here.
There are some other potential gotcha's along the way ... certain DJI models don't geotag images with the true gps altitude, but instead use barometer altitude (which can change wildly from day to day.) There must be a time that makes sense, but I haven't been able to figure out when that would be. There is a work around where you can add an option to the processing script to force an initial (estimated) altitude for all your pictures ... but you may need to remember what altitude you flew at and figure out the starting ground altitude. The processing tools need a ball park initial image position estimate to work correctly. If the height is too far off that can cause issues later in the pipeline. If you run into this (maybe you flew with a phantom) I can help walk you through this when you get to that point.
Best regards,
Curt.