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[Feature Request] Get all point cloud/sfm clusters

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
32/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
api, data

Research direction

Start with the SDK's existing bounding-box image retrieval and the graph.mapillary.com/images endpoint. Verify how sfm_cluster is exposed, then define the get_point_clouds(bbox, links=false) behavior for links versus fetched objects and oversized boxes. Done means the requested point-cloud results are returned for a valid bbox, with the 5000-item limit handled explicitly.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

feature

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Some users may want to retrieve the point clouds for a geographic. Each Mapillary image has an associated point cloud in the sfm_cluster field.

Describe the solution you'd like
There are two ways to allow a user to retrieve this:

  1. a list of links
  2. a list of point cloud objects

The function could be something like get_point_clouds(bbox,links=false) which does the following:

  1. calls graph.mapillary.com/images?bbox=lon1,lat1,lon2,lat2&limit=5000
  2. checks if bbox includes 5000 or more response items (if so, it is maxxed out, we need smaller bbox)
  3. if not maxxed out, get all the images in the bbox with fields=sfm_cluster
  4. if links=false (default) run a loop, for each image, do a get request for the sfm_cluster URL, and append to a list
  5. return the list of sfm_cluster data objects
  6. if links=true, then just return a list of the URLs, do not request the data
  7. if bbox too big in step 2, then split into 4 smaller bboxes, or warn user to simply use a smaller bbox

Describe alternatives you've considered
It might be good to just request using the tiles, the way we get images from a bbox, but I am not certain that these images via tiles have the sfm_cluster URL, so it would not work

Additional context
The point cloud should be in .ply file format, but this is not important, just retrieving the objects lets the user make use of them (they would use it with the OpenSfM library)

Dominant language
Python
Stars
66
Forks
23
Avg merge
1d 20h
Merged PRs (30d)
11

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