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CPU support for dense reconstruction
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Dense reconstruction requires CUDA which is not available to machines with non-NVIDIA GPUs and Macs. As a Mac user, this means there is no way to do dense reconstruction.
Describe the solution you'd like Enable dense reconstruction to run on the CPU to make it available to MacOS and non-nvidia GPUs.
Describe alternatives you've considered I do not see any. Getting a Windows/Linux machine with a NVIDIA GPU seems the only way right now to do dense reconstruction in COLMAP.
Additional context An alternative way to solve the problem at least for Mac users would be to enable Metal GPU support as per this feature request.
Running MVS on CPU will be very very slow so it would practically be useless. Having a metal implementation of MVS indeed would be more practical, but we don't have the bandwidth to work on it. You are welcome to do it yourself and contribute it back.
Would a Vulkan implementation also be desired? That might allow for more flexibility and less hardware dependency. I may be interested in working on either a metal or Vulkan implementation to further my skillset.
This would be pretty cool! AFAIK Apple M1 will never support Vulkan natively so any solution to make it work, like MoltenVK, is only a translation layer and will never make full use of the benefits of M1 and Metal. I don't have much expertise in this so I can't really advise - though I suspect that Metal will get increasingly popular in the future so it could have more potential.
I can try to start adding metal support! I currently have zero metal experience and have only done computer vision at the hobby level by implementing some algorithms in Hartley and Zisserman using openCV in my spare time. But this is something I am very interested in as a Mac user! Do you have any advice while I start my journey?