Photogrammetry: 50 MP or 108 MP phone camera ? any experience?

Hi all,

I have a general user experience question:

I mainly work with an iPhone 12 Pro Max (12MP) and Canon D80 (24MP) for photogrammetry work.
The bigger the image the more dense the mesh detail can be in photogrammetry.

There are apps that can upscale images quite well but it is still not like a 12 MP iPhone looking like a 24 MP Canon camera.

So I am curious about getting a 48 / 108 MP smartphone for just snapping images.

Does anybody have experience with the following two models?

Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro 5G 108 MP
BLU G91 Pro 48 MP

I am curious how useable those cameras are.

NOTE: I know that those smartphone cameras are not equal to professional cameras like the Canon!

Keep in mind that RAWs from 80D may be of much better quality than smartphone photos. I use 60D with f/8 to reach max sharpness and denoising in DxO Deep Prime.

Take a look at this example - 31 photos, Meshroom:

I wonder how will AI upscaling work in photogrammetry since these additional details not exist, but are merely calculated.

I think the sharpness of the image is just as important as the MP count.
Maybe you could look into the camera reviews for those phones to figure out if they produce sharp crisp images?

Side note: I think processing such images will tax your machine so make sure your PC has enough RAM to cope.

Notebookcheck.net usually posts the pics they took in smartphone reviews.

I always wanted to get more into photogrammetry and using the smarphone seems to be… well smart. But to be honest i barely use one and so the one i have was gift from someone who bought a new one… and the camera doesn’t work :sweat_smile:… Anyway sometimes i look for articles which tell me how to spent some hundred EUR for… (my inner self interrupting here: :rage: no… wait… first use the latest gift (a GTX660 graphics card) and learn to use EEVEE render which don’t need at leat 10 sec to show an image:innocent: okay okay calm down… just like Bobby sung: Be Happy)

Anyway – this might be helpful:

(note to self: next time just type: Has seen this lately, but didn’t get too much into it…)

There are some side by side videos online but they do not stress / show what is a 12MP want is the 108MP image.

Those videos are really informative when they have three phones on a rig and shoot the images at the same time.

MP count does improve feature recognition by a lot ! Between 12 and 24 MP you can significant detail differences. Also processing time ;).

Image sharpness is also important!

Images can be upscaled with ML AI but even
basic interpolation can help.

But I rather would like to try a native 108
MP sensor than just using up scaling.

I use a 48MP DIJ drone and the architecture scans are significantly better compared to the 12MB camera of my DIJ spark.

Here u can see the detail differences

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