Architecture
The two main ContextCapture modules are ContextCapture Master and ContextCapture Engine. They follow a master-worker pattern:
- ContextCapture Master is the master module of ContextCapture . Through a graphical user interface, it allows you to define input data and processing settings, to submit processing tasks, to monitor the progress of these tasks, to visualize their results, etc. The Master does not perform the processing tasks. Instead, it decomposes tasks into elementary jobs which it submits to a job queue.
- ContextCapture Engine is the worker module of ContextCapture . It runs on a computer in the background, without user interaction. When it is not busy, the Engine takes a pending job in the queue, depending on its priority and date of submission, and executes it. A job usually consists of processing aerotriangulation or 3D reconstruction, using various computationally intensive algorithms (keypoint extraction, automatic tie point matching, bundle adjustment, dense image matching, robust 3D reconstruction, seamless texture mapping, texture atlas packing, level-of-detail generation, ...).
For automation needs, ContextCapture Master interface can also be replaced by calls to a Python API. See also ContextCapture ContextCapture MasterKernel SDK.
Thanks to this master-worker pattern, ContextCapture supports grid computing. You can dramatically reduce processing time simply by running multiple ContextCapture engines on several computers, and associate them to a same job queue.
ContextCapture 's grid computing ability is based on the operating system's native file sharing mechanism. This allows ContextCapture to transparently handle a SAN, a NAS or a shared standard HDD. No specific grid computing architecture needs to be deployed.
- ContextCapture Viewer is ContextCapture 's free lightweight visualization module. It is optimized for ContextCapture 's native format, which handles level-of-detail, paging and streaming, thus allowing visualization of terabytes of 3D data, locally or online, with a smooth frame rate. You can use ContextCapture Viewer in conjunction with ContextCapture Master to control production quality all along the workflow. You can also use it to navigate final results.
- ContextCapture Settings: to manage configuration of ContextCapture .
- License Management Tool: to manage licensing of ContextCapture .