IS-MVSNet: Importance Sampling-Based MVSNet

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 20x 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.