Graphical User Interface

The graphical user interface of COLMAP provides access to most of the available functionality and visualizes the reconstruction process in “real-time”. To start the GUI, you can run the pre-built packages (Windows: COLMAP.bat, Mac: COLMAP.app), execute colmap gui if you installed COLMAP or execute ./src/colmap/exe/colmap gui from the CMake build folder. The GUI application requires an attached display with at least OpenGL 3.2 support. Registered images are visualized in red and reconstructed points in their average point color extracted from the images. The viewer can also visualize dense point clouds produced from Multi-View Stereo.

Model Viewer Controls

  • Rotate model: Left-click and drag.

  • Shift model: Right-click or <CTRL>-click (<CMD>-click) and drag.

  • Zoom model: Scroll.

  • Change point size: <CTRL>-scroll (<CMD>-scroll).

  • Change camera size: <ALT>-scroll.

  • Adjust clipping plane: <SHIFT>-scroll.

  • Select point: Double-left-click point (change point size if too small). The green lines visualize the projections into the images that see the point. The opening window shows the projected locations of the point in all images.

  • Select camera: Double-left-click camera (change camera size if too small). The purple lines visualize images that see at least one common point with the selected image. The opening window shows a few statistics of the image.

  • Reset view: To reset all viewing settings, choose Render > Reset view.

Render Options

The model viewer allows you to render the model with different settings, projections, colormaps, etc. Please, choose Render > Render options.

Create Screenshots

To create screenshots of the current viewpoint (without coordinate axes), choose Extras > Grab image and save the image in the format of your choice.

Create Screencast

To create a video screen capture of the reconstructed model, choose Extras > Grab movie. This dialog allows you to set individual control viewpoints by choosing Add. COLMAP generates a fixed number of frames per second between each control viewpoint by smoothly interpolating the linear trajectory, and to interpolate the configured point and the camera sizes at the time of clicking Add. To change the number of frames between two viewpoints or to reorder individual viewpoints, modify the time of the viewpoint by double-clicking the respective cell in the table. Note that the video capture requires to set the perspective projection model in the render options. You can review the trajectory in the viewer, which is rendered in light blue. Choose Assemble movie, if you are done creating the trajectory. The output directory then contains the individual frames of the video capture, which can be assembled to a movie using FFMPEG with the following command:

ffmpeg -i frame%06d.png -r 30 -vf scale=1680:1050 movie.mp4