SURE Software - Empowering Photogrammetry

Full automatic 3D reconstruction and color-balanced true orthos from imagery with unsurpassed performance and flexibility - as simple as you want and as advanced as you need

SURE Software transforms imagery from classic aerial cameras, multi-head oblique systems, drone cameras as well as most consumer-grade terrestrial cameras into 2.5D or 3D data, such as point clouds, photorealistic textured meshes and true orthophotos in a streamlined full automatic integrated process with image processing techniques (tSGM). Process simple areas up to entire cities and states.

nFrames GmbH

Stuttgart, DE

Description

SURE is a synonym performance scalability and for outstanding quality. Pointclouds and meshes preserve maximum detail with one 3D point per image pixel while being almost free of noise. The exceptional sharpness of extracted edges are building the basis for unsurpassed 3D city-models and perfect seamless trueorthos.

Standard exchange formats for input (e.g. with Trimble/Inpho MATCH-AT, Pix4D, Agisoft...) and output (e.g. Meshes in OBJ, Cesium and Collada) guarantee for full connectivity to 3rd party workflows. Sophisticated quality assurance even during ongoing processing is available as well as the possibility to pause and continue where the process was left-over. Customized workflows are existing to do edits and feed refined intermediate results or additional LiDAR data back into the workflow. The full package is completed with a mesh editor to optionally refine deliverables for maximum quality.

SURE perfectly scales with the size of your datasets and with the computing environment that is provided. Power-users benefit fom distributed processing capabilities in autonomously managed dynamic computer clusters, where nodes and licenses (e.g. additional rentals) can be scaled-up even during ongoing processing. The splitting into subprojects and the distribution to the nodes is automatically organized with respect to easiest user experience while maintaining homogeneous quality throughout the whole project.

Additional data such as water polygons, aerea definition polygons or even LiDAR clouds can be leveraged to support processing.

The company nFrames has its roots in the research department of the Stuttgart University for photogrammetry. Our success is founded on the ongoing collaboration with more than 300 researchers world-wide to create a high-performance product that can be used without need for photogrammetric expertise.

SURE technology is also available for integrators through existing libraries and APIs.

Available modules:

SURE Aerial – for classic and custom photogrammetric processing with airborne cameras ( nadir or oblique ), including seamless color-balanced true orthos, colored point clouds, DSM, 2.5D textured meshes and LiDAR data integration.

SURE Aerial Mesh Add-on - adds 3D textured meshing capability to SURE Aerial

SURE Editor – sophisticated mesh-editing and refinement (flattening, edge sharpening, spike removal...)

Get in touch at www.nFrames.com

Specifications

Feature Extraction and Mapping: Mapping facilities

N

Semi-automatic corner point extraction

N

Semi-automatic line feature extraction

N

Semi-automatic building extraction

N

3D superimposition

Y

Integration with point clouds

Y

Automatic texturing

Y

Integration with 2D vector maps

N

Integration with scanned maps

N

Integration with 3D vector maps

N

Required Computer System: System includes hardware

N

Operating system(s)

Windows, Linux

CPU (min.)

64 Bit processor

CPU (preferred)

Intel i7 or Xeon

Min. RAM memory [Mb]

16000

Preferred RAM memory [Mb]

64000

Min. data storage capacity [Gb]

1

Preferred data storage capacity [Gb]

4000

Min. graphic card

Any

Supported special hardware

Nvidia graphics cards. Runs on almost every common hardware and operating system.

User definable operations and extensions

24 Threads per license (1 graphics card) scalable through distributed processing cluster

64-bit version of software available

Y

Distributed processing capacity

Y

GPU based calculations

Y

Hardware handling of big data sets

Nvidia with CUDA support and 11GB memory

Images and data: Source data

Airborne large and medium frame, close range, UAS, mobile mapping. Support of Nadir and Oblique imagery. Orientation information can be imported from Trimble Inpho-Match-AT, Trimble UASMaster or Trimble Business Center Photogrammetry, Pix4D Mapper, Agisoft Photoscan, Visual SFM, Bundler and more.

Input image formats

TIF (8 & 16 Bit, up to four channels, also tiled and pyramids), PNG (8 & 16 Bit), JPG (8 Bit)

Export data formats

True-Orthos: TIF, GeoTIF (multichannel, 8-16bit) - Pointclouds/DSM: LAS, LAZ, PLY, TXT - Meshes: OBJ, Cesium, Collada

Scanned analogue Aerial Photos

Y

Digital Aerial Nadir Frames

Y

Oblique Images

Y

Linear array sensors

N

Optical Satellite Images

N

UAS Images

Y

Radar Images

N

DEMs & Orthoimages: Automatic matching

Semi-Global-Matching variation (tSGM). By efficiently matching on automatically selected stereo models and subsequently merging and refining the result in the point cloud generation, low noise point clouds with quality information can be retrieved. Hierarchical approaches speed up the process and enable the support of depth large variations in the scene.

Automatic breakline extraction

N

Checking facilities (DEM editing)

Y

Automatic contour generation

N

Mosaicing of orthoimages

Y

True orthoimage generation

Y

Dense DSM creating capability

Y

DSM to DTM filtering

N

Automatic seam line creation

Y

Dense Image Matching

Y

Viewing System: Min. display memory [Mb]

512

Pref. display memory [Mb]

6000

Resolution

Any

Method of stereo image separation

Stereo image matching is performed using a hierarchical variation of the Semi Global Matching (SGM) approach called tSGM. Stereo visualization is only avaliable for inspection of generated meshes.

General: Year of introduction

2013

Year of last update

2020

Modular

SURE Aerial - SURE Aerial Mesh Add-on - SURE Editor - SURE LiDAR - SURE SDK

License configuration

14 day trial version after free download, perpetual or rental options, 1 instance per computer

Regional settings available

English language, support of all units

Orientation and triangulation: Automatic interior

N

Relative

N

Automatic aerotriangulation

N

Automated blunder detection

N

Self calibration

N

Automatic Relative

import of 3rd party exterior orientation formats

images simultaneously processed

Y

Measurement tools: Length

Y

Area

N

Volume

N

Image manipulation & processing: Automatic contrast manipulations

Y

Spatial convolution

N

Radiometric corrections

Y

Radiometric adjustment for mosaicing

Y

Resampling

Y

More information: Main applications

City Modeling, Smart Cities, Area Mapping, Landcover Mapping, Cadastre, Environmental Research, Agriculture, Forestry, Construction, Mining, Infrastructure and Inventory, Energy, Powerline Mapping, Pipeline Mapping, Inspection, Risk Assessment, Forensics, Navigation, Classificaton, Change Detection, Volume computations

Distinguishable features

Support for LiDAR/Nadir imagery/Oblique imagery, generate true orthos with highest quality and sharpest edges, generate fotorealistic color-balanced 3D-meshes and 2.5D-meshes, preserve details but expect low noise in pointclouds / dsm / meshes (suited for e.g. pole detection), be compatible through flexible input-/output formats, export into streaming (level-of-detail aware) formats (e.g. Cesium tiles, Collada...), perfectly scale production capacity to any project sizes and available hardware and budget, use a dynamic number of computers and licenses even during on-going processing for distributed processing with autonomous cluster management / automatic tiling, pre-deliver finished sub-areas before complete project finishes (homogeneous borders are guaranteed), rely on predefined parameters through application scenarios and automatic best model selection, effectively stream data from disc for visualization and mesh editing, leverage high redundancy / reliability, customize processing with onestop / multistep workflow, LiDAR integration (feed-in 3rd party data), automatic waterbody filtering, stop and continue function, polygons to export sub-areas,