How to pass image masks to 'ns-process-data images'?

[andynewman10]

I have nerfstudio running and it is working fine. I am using the following commands:

ns-process-data images --data mydataset --output-dir mydatasetprocessed
cd mydatasetprocessed
ns-train

All is running well however I cannot figure out how to pass per-image masks, just like the way I am doing it manually using the COLMAP GUI. This is a blocking issue for me.

When using the COLMAP GUI, I can specify the folder for images (images) and another folder for corresponding masks (masks). It works fine.

Where is ns-process-data images expected to find image masks? I read the documentation and it seems to be supported, but I am not sure if it really is (EDIT: the following issue talks about a Mustard dataset, with masks, but unfortunately the link to the dataset is now dead: #1498 (comment))

Considering ns-process-data images may not be supporting masks at all, I tried to

• manually run COLMAP. This generates the sparse/0 folder with the bin files, as well as the database.db and project.ini files.
• instruct ns-process-data images to use existing COLMAP output as-is, and just generate the transforms.json file, without which training cannot take place. I saw there is a --skip-colmap option for this purpose.

Unfortunately, ns-process-data images --skip-colmap does not want to proceed because it does not find the images_2, images_4 and images_8 subfolders, that are automatically generated under normal circumstances (when --skip-colmap is not used).