We present an end-to-end deep learning architecture for depth map inference from multi-view images. In the network, we first extract deep visual image features, and then build the 3D cost volume upon the reference camera frustum via the differentiable homography warping. Next, we apply 3D convolutions to regularize and regress the initial depth map, which is then refined with the reference image to generate the final output. Our framework flexibly adapts arbitrary N-view inputs using a variance-based cost metric that maps multiple features into one cost feature. The proposed MVSNet is demonstrated on the large-scale indoor DTU dataset. With simple post-processing, our method not only significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-arts, but also is several times faster in runtime. We also evaluate MVSNet on the complex outdoor Tanks and Temples dataset, where our method ranks first before April 18, 2018 without any fine-tuning, showing the strong generalization ability of MVSNet.
According to output representations, MVS methods can be categorized into 1) direct point cloud reconstructions @cite_20 @cite_26 , 2) volumetric reconstructions @cite_19 @cite_27 @cite_16 @cite_3 and 3) depth map reconstructions @cite_24 @cite_35 @cite_7 @cite_39 @cite_23 . Point cloud based methods operate directly on 3D points, usually relying on the propagation strategy to gradually densify the reconstruction @cite_20 @cite_26 . As the propagation of point clouds is proceeded sequentially, these methods are difficult to be fully parallelized and usually take a long time in processing. Volumetric based methods divide the 3D space into regular grids and then estimate if each voxel is adhere to the surface. The downsides for this representation are the space discretization error and the high memory consumption. In contrast, depth map is the most flexible representation among all. It decouples the complex MVS problem into relatively small problems of per-view depth map estimation, which focuses on only one reference and a few source images at a time. Also, depth maps can be easily fused to the point cloud @cite_10 or the volumetric reconstructions @cite_11 . According to the recent MVS benchmarks @cite_18 @cite_9 , current best MVS algorithms @cite_7 @cite_39 are both depth map based approaches.
@cite_35 @cite_18 @cite_26 @cite_7 @cite_9 @cite_3 @cite_39 @cite_24 @cite_19 @cite_27 @cite_23 @cite_16 @cite_10 @cite_20 @cite_11
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The seminal multiple-view stereo benchmark evaluations from Middlebury and by have played a major role in propelling the development of multi-view stereopsis (MVS) methodology. The somewhat small size and variability of these data sets, however, limit their scope and the conclusions that can be derived from them. To facilitate further development within MVS, we here present a new and varied data set consisting of 80 scenes, seen from 49 or 64 accurate camera positions. This is accompanied by accurate structured light scans for reference and evaluation. In addition all images are taken under seven different lighting conditions. As a benchmark and to validate the use of our data set for obtaining reasonable and statistically significant findings about MVS, we have applied the three state-of-the-art MVS algorithms by , , and to the data set. To do this we have extended the evaluation protocol from the Middlebury evaluation, necessitated by the more complex geometry of some of our scenes. The data set and accompanying evaluation framework are made freely available online. Based on this evaluation, we are able to observe several characteristics of state-of-the-art MVS, e.g. that there is a tradeoff between the quality of the reconstructed 3D points (accuracy) and how much of an object's surface is captured (completeness). Also, several issues that we hypothesized would challenge MVS, such as specularities and changing lighting conditions did not pose serious problems. Our study finds that the two most pressing issues for MVS are lack of texture and meshing (forming 3D points into closed triangulated surfaces). This paper presents a novel probabilistic foundation for volumetric 3D reconstruction. We formulate the problem as inference in a Markov random field, which accurately captures the dependencies between the occupancy and appearance of each voxel, given all input images. Our main contribution is an approximate highly parallelized discrete-continuous inference algorithm to compute the marginal distributions of each voxel's occupancy and appearance. In contrast to the MAP solution, marginals encode the underlying uncertainty and ambiguity in the reconstruction. Moreover, the proposed algorithm allows for a Bayes optimal prediction with respect to a natural reconstruction loss. We compare our method to two state-of-the-art volumetric reconstruction algorithms on three challenging aerial datasets with LIDAR ground truth. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm compares favorably in terms of reconstruction accuracy and the ability to expose reconstruction uncertainty. Accurate recovery of 3D geometrical surfaces from calibrated 2D multi-view images is a fundamental yet active research area in computer vision. Despite the steady progress in multi-view stereo (MVS) reconstruction, many existing methods are still limited in recovering fine-scale details and sharp features while suppressing noises, and may fail in reconstructing regions with less textures. To address these limitations, this paper presents a detail-preserving and content-aware variational (DCV) MVS method, which reconstructs the 3D surface by alternating between reprojection error minimization and mesh denoising. In reprojection error minimization, we propose a novel inter-image similarity measure, which is effective to preserve fine-scale details of the reconstructed surface and builds a connection between guided image filtering and image registration. In mesh denoising, we propose a content-aware @math -minimization algorithm by adaptively estimating the @math value and regularization parameters. Compared with conventional isotropic mesh smoothing approaches, the proposed method is much more promising in suppressing noise while preserving sharp features. Experimental results on benchmark data sets demonstrate that our DCV method is capable of recovering more surface details, and obtains cleaner and more accurate reconstructions than the state-of-the-art methods. In particular, our method achieves the best results among all published methods on the Middlebury dino ring and dino sparse data sets in terms of both completeness and accuracy. We propose an algorithm to improve the quality of depth-maps used for Multi-View Stereo (MVS). Many existing MVS techniques make use of a two stage approach which estimates depth-maps from neighbouring images and then merges them to extract a final surface. Often the depth-maps used for the merging stage will contain outliers due to errors in the matching process. Traditional systems exploit redundancy in the image sequence (the surface is seen in many views), in order to make the final surface estimate robust to these outliers. In the case of sparse data sets there is often insufficient redundancy and thus performance degrades as the number of images decreases. In order to improve performance in these circumstances it is necessary to remove the outliers from the depth-maps. We identify the two main sources of outliers in a top performing algorithm: (1) spurious matches due to repeated texture and (2) matching failure due to occlusion, distortion and lack of texture. We propose two contributions to tackle these failure modes. Firstly, we store multiple depth hypotheses and use a spatial consistency constraint to extract the true depth. Secondly, we allow the algorithm to return an unknownstate when the a true depth estimate cannot be found. By combining these in a discrete label MRF optimisation we are able to obtain high accuracy depth-maps with low numbers of outliers. We evaluate our algorithm in a multi-view stereo framework and find it to confer state-of-the-art performance with the leading techniques, in particular on the standard evaluation sparse data sets.