To get things started, this is a post about a piece of photogrammetry / multi-view stereo reconstruction software that I have been gradually writing during spare time over the last few years. Think of something like Agisoft Photoscan, but without the user-friendliness. At the time, this was somewhat more trendy than it is now and I spent my weekends traveling around Berlin finding anything worth scanning.
Berlin is a fascinating place for 3D scanning, thanks to a mixture of older and more modern architecture, along with plenty of statues scattered around the many parks. In this case my target was a nicely detailed statue of a boy and horse located near the Schloss Bellevue in Tiergarten. It was a fairly easy choice thanks to the weathered surface, but there is just enough of a specular response to cause some concern, and the possibility of bad feature tracking on the leaves behind moving in the wind.
For the capture I used a 16 Megapixel Panasonic G3 micro four thirds camera with a 25mm lens. The smaller sensor can cause some noise issues in shadowed or poorly textured regions, but in this case most of the scene was fairly well illuminated.
