Photogrammetry Engine Update

September 9, 2025

Introducing significant speed improvements, sharper orthophotos, DEMs and improved 3D models completeness.

WebODM Lightning ⚡ is named this way because I aim to offer the fastest WebODM cloud processing service. I routinely invest in infrastructure upgrades, use my expertise to fine-tune the processing nodes and I keep making improvements to the software to shave off seconds. Or in this case, up to hours.

I'm pleased to announce version 3.9.8 of the processing engine which is now deployed network-wide and introduces several new improvements and fixes.

15% Faster Processing

I improved the speed of processing on virtually all datasets by at least 15%. Often the speed improvement will be greater, depending on the dataset and processing settings, but expect your results to process much quicker than before. 🕒

Complete 3D Textured Models

Watertight meshes are desirable, but sometimes challenging to reconstruct, for example when there are not enough photos to cover all angles of a scene. This is especially common with aerial scenes, where nadir shots often miss critical sections of buildings. I substantially improved the ability to reconstruct textured meshes and are now able to preserve nearly occluded areas.

Building Facades Appear — Facades of buildings, before and after

More Defined Elevation Models

I improved the quality of elevation models by performing updates to the multi-view stereo pipeline as well as tuning the parameters that affect the 2D rasterization. Aside from elevation models, expect these improvements to be reflected on point clouds as well.

Sharper DEMs — Building edges become more defined, before and after

Sharper Orthophotos

Finally, I couldn't finish this update without making some improvements in orthophoto rendering:

Less relief displacement — Relief displacement noise decrease in a difficult dataset, before and after

Projecting the correct pixels on a map is a tricky endeavour I obsess over pixels. This update makes orthophotos both sharper and less noisy, a feat that I achieved by researching novel approaches to camera selection and regularization methods.

New Blog!

A quick side note, this is my first WebODM Lightning blog update and I will periodically post updates about the fun stuff that I'm working on going forward. While I currently haven't implemented a comment section, if you'd like to chat about anything, feel free to reach out at anytime.

Thank you and happy processing.

-Piero