ContextCapture Engine

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 an aerotriangulation or 3D reconstruction process, 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, ...).

ContextCapture Engine makes an extensive use of general-purpose computation on graphics processing units (GPGPU). Each Engine can exploit a single GPU.

Starting/ending the engine

Click on the ContextCapture Engine desktop shortcut to start the engine.

ContextCapture Engine window

Once running, ContextCapture Engine listens to the Job queue directory which is configured thanks to ContextCapture Settings (Refer to Installation and registration).

To close ContextCapture Engine, simply close the engine console. Any running Job will be moved back into the job queue, with a pending status and its original priority. Pending jobs will remain in the Job queue , waiting to be processed by a next execution of ContextCapture Engine.

ContextCapture Engine specialization

By default, ContextCapture Engine processes both aerotriangulation and reconstruction jobs.

On a computer cluster, it may be useful to specialize engines to process only a specific type of job.

To specialize ContextCapture Engine, run it with the following commands:

Aerotriangulation jobs only:
```
CCEngine --type AT
```

TileProduction and RasterProduction jobs only:

 CCEngine --type "TileProduction
RasterProduction"

Limiting the number of threads

Set the environment variable CC_MAX_THREADS to define the maximum number of parallel threads executing ContextCapture Engine.

This advanced setting may be useful to preserve responsiveness of other applications running on the same computer (e.g. leave one core for ContextCapture Master if it is installed on the same computer).

Restrictions

Remote Desktop Connection

ContextCapture Engine cannot work through a Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection because hardware acceleration is disabled. However you can use VNC or a remote administration software like TeamViewer.

Windows session

Switching Windows user while ContextCapture Engine is running will cause running computations to fail because hardware acceleration is disabled when the user is not connected.