IS-MVSNet: Importance Sampling-Based MVSNet

Likang Wang, Yue Gong, Xinjun Ma, Qirui Wang, Kaixuan Zhou, Lei Chen

Abstract: This paper presents a novel coarse-to-fine multi-view stereo (MVS) algorithm called importance-sampling-based MVSNet (IS-MVSNet) to address a crucial problem of limited depth resolution adopted by current learning-based MVS methods. We proposed an importance-sampling module for sampling candidate depth, effectively achieving higher depth resolution and yielding better point-cloud results while introducing no additional cost. Furthermore, we proposed an unsupervised error distribution estimation method for adjusting the density variation of the importance-sampling module. Notably, the proposed sampling module does not require any additional training and works reasonably well with the pre-trained weights of the baseline model. Our proposed method leads to up to $$20\times $$ promotion on the most refined depth resolution, thus significantly benefiting most scenarios and excellently superior on fine details. As a result, IS-MVSNet outperforms all the published papers on TNT’s intermediate benchmark with an F-score of 62.82%. Code is available at github.com/NoOneUST/IS-MVSNet.