Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE)

The following tutorial covers the use of Microsoft Research's Image Composite Editor or ICE for drone mapping.

Background

Our initial goal was to use Open Drone Map (ODM) a FOSS4G application to create orthophotos from the autonomous drone images using DroneDeploy. At our training workshop we discovered that only three PC Workstations were able to install ODM. The remaining systems did not have enough computing capacity to process orthophotos. As a result an alternative was needed and we decided that MS ICE (free application) is a viable alternative for the majority there.

Mongolian: https://trainingquadcopters.blogspot.com/2018/07/opendronemap-with-docker-toolbox-for.html

English: https://trainingquadcopters.blogspot.com/2018/06/opendronemap-with-docker-toolbox-on.html

Applications like ODM and Agisoft Photoscan automatically uses the EXIF coordinates in the drone photos to georeference the orthophoto map, ICE does not. ICE uses blending technology to stitch the photos together. What is produced is a mosaic of all the photos which needs to be georeferenced with GIS software. QGIS has a plugin 'georeferencer' which can be used.

Download & Install

The Microsoft ICE website is: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/computational-photography-applications/image-composite-editor/
and software can be downloaded for both 64-bit and 32-bit versions depending on your hardware.

Additional Features

• Accelerated stitching on multiple CPU cores.
• Support for “structured panoramas” — panoramas consisting of hundreds of photos taken in a rectangular grid of rows and columns (usually by robotic devices such as GigaPan tripod heads).
• State-of-the-art stitching engine.
• Support for very large image sizes including stitching gigapixel panoramas.
• Support for input images with 8 or 16 bits per component.
• Support for Photoshop layers and large documents.
• Ability to read raw images using WIC codecs.
• Automatic exposure blending.
• Choice of planar, cylindrical, stereographic, orthographic, Mercator, or spherical projection.
• Orientation tool for adjusting panorama rotation.
• Automatic cropping to maximum image area.
• Native support for 64-bit operating systems.
• Wide range of output formats, including JPEG, JPEG XR, PSD, TIFF, BMP, PNG, and Silverlight Deep Zoom.

Raster processing is very CPU intensive so PC workstations with at least 2 CPUs are needed. The more CPUs the better similarly RAM and hard disk space is also important. 

Note: the Windows OS is not very good at releasing memory consequently for best performance reboot your workstation and start ICE immediately. Do not run other tasks in the background or they will degrade performance and in some cases slow down the operation so much that you will be better off to terminate the run and restart.

When the process is complete you can export the stitched mosaic map. Recommend you use 'Superb' jpg quality for the export.

As you process more images with larger flight missions the process will take longer and you will get more options. Recommend you test the different options to find the best results.  Unlike ODM or Agisoft Photoscan the output is not a geo-referenced map image. You will need to use a GIS application like QGIS to geo-reference the image for GIS analysis and digitizing. Please check the tutorial on using QGIS for geo registration.

Augusto (Gus) Ribeiro
2018.08.14