Agisoft

Agisoft
Name	Agisoft
Type	Private
Industry	Photogrammetry software
Founded	2006
Headquarters	St. Petersburg, Russia
Products	Agisoft Metashape, Agisoft PhotoScan

Agisoft is a Russian software developer known for producing commercial photogrammetry and 3D reconstruction tools used in cultural heritage, surveying, visual effects, and scientific research. The company gained recognition through flagship software that connects workflows used by professionals associated with Archaeological Survey, National Geographic Society, Smithsonian Institution, UNESCO World Heritage Committee, and projects funded by European Commission grants. Agisoft products have been employed alongside hardware and institutions such as Nikon Corporation, Canon Inc., DJI, Leica Geosystems, and research groups at University of Oxford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University.

History

Agisoft was founded in 2006 in St. Petersburg during a period of rapid development in computational photography and photogrammetry, contemporaneous with advances at Google, Microsoft Research, and laboratories like Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories. Early releases built on algorithms explored at conferences including IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, European Conference on Computer Vision, and International Conference on Computer Vision. The company’s timeline intersects with milestones from organizations such as OpenCV, Bundeswehr University Munich, and projects at ETH Zurich that popularized structure-from-motion and multi-view stereo. Over time Agisoft’s software has been integrated into workflows used by UNICEF humanitarian mapping initiatives, FEMA disaster assessment teams, and media productions at BBC Studios and Industrial Light & Magic.

Products

Agisoft’s primary commercial offering is a desktop application first released under the name PhotoScan and later rebranded as Metashape; this product family competes with software from Pix4D, Bentley Systems, Autodesk, and open-source projects like Meshroom and OpenSfM. Complementary tools and SDKs target interoperability with Esri, QGIS, ArcGIS Pro, and file formats used by Autodesk Maya, Blender, Cinema 4D, and Unity Technologies. Enterprise customers combine Agisoft outputs with hardware ecosystems from Trimble Navigation, Topcon Corporation, and UAV platforms manufactured by DJI Innovations and Parrot SA.

Technology and Features

The software implements photogrammetric pipelines including image alignment, sparse point cloud generation, dense stereo reconstruction, mesh generation, and texture mapping, drawing on methodologies discussed in papers from SIGGRAPH, ACM Transactions on Graphics, and Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Features include camera calibration and lens distortion correction compatible with lens databases maintained by DxOMark, support for ground control points interoperable with Global Positioning System solutions and Real-Time Kinematic workflows from Trimble, and scripting APIs for automation used by teams at NASA and European Space Agency. GPU acceleration leverages technologies from NVIDIA and AMD and integrates with cloud processing services provided by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform in third-party pipelines.

Applications and Use Cases

Agisoft software is applied in cultural heritage documentation for sites listed by UNESCO World Heritage Committee and museums such as the Louvre, British Museum, and Hermitage Museum; in archaeological recording alongside teams from British Archaeological Association and Institute of Archaeology, University College London; in topographic mapping for projects run by US Geological Survey and Ordnance Survey; and in forensic science used by police forces such as the Metropolitan Police Service and agencies like the FBI. Visual effects and game development studios including Weta Digital, Epic Games, and Ubisoft have used photogrammetric assets in pipelines with tools from Autodesk, SideFX, and Substance by Adobe. Environmental monitoring and forestry applications link outputs to analyses by World Wildlife Fund, Food and Agriculture Organization, and research at Cornell University and Colorado State University.

Licensing and Business Model

Agisoft distributes commercial licenses for single-user and network editions, academic licenses for universities such as University of Cambridge and Harvard University, and volume agreements used by government agencies like Ministry of Defence (United Kingdom) and municipal authorities such as City of New York. The company’s model parallels competitors Pix4D and RealityCapture with perpetual and subscription options and offers SDKs enabling integration into enterprise systems from Hexagon AB and Bentley Systems. Pricing and deployment are negotiated with resellers and system integrators including firms in the geospatial sector and defence contractors like BAE Systems.

Reception and Criticism

Agisoft Metashape has been praised in peer-reviewed studies and industry reports published by Journal of Archaeological Science, Remote Sensing of Environment, and conference proceedings at ISPRS, for accuracy and usability compared with alternatives such as COLMAP and MicMac. Criticisms reported by users and institutions focus on licensing opacity noted in discussions involving Open-source Initiative advocates, performance variability on heterogeneous hardware cited in community forums hosted by Stack Overflow and GitHub, and occasional interoperability issues with GIS platforms referenced by practitioners at Esri User Conference. Debates about proprietary versus open-source photogrammetry have involved stakeholders including Wikimedia Foundation and academic consortia at Max Planck Society and CNRS.

Category:Photogrammetry software