MVSTER: Epipolar Transformer for Efficient Multi-View Stereo
This work addresses efficiency and accuracy bottlenecks in 3D reconstruction for computer vision applications, representing a strong specific gain rather than a foundational shift.
The paper tackles the problem of inefficient multi-view stereo (MVS) by introducing MVSTER, which uses an epipolar Transformer to learn 2D semantics and 3D spatial associations, achieving state-of-the-art reconstruction with 34% and 14% relative improvements on DTU benchmark and 80% and 51% reductions in running time compared to prior methods.
Learning-based Multi-View Stereo (MVS) methods warp source images into the reference camera frustum to form 3D volumes, which are fused as a cost volume to be regularized by subsequent networks. The fusing step plays a vital role in bridging 2D semantics and 3D spatial associations. However, previous methods utilize extra networks to learn 2D information as fusing cues, underusing 3D spatial correlations and bringing additional computation costs. Therefore, we present MVSTER, which leverages the proposed epipolar Transformer to learn both 2D semantics and 3D spatial associations efficiently. Specifically, the epipolar Transformer utilizes a detachable monocular depth estimator to enhance 2D semantics and uses cross-attention to construct data-dependent 3D associations along epipolar line. Additionally, MVSTER is built in a cascade structure, where entropy-regularized optimal transport is leveraged to propagate finer depth estimations in each stage. Extensive experiments show MVSTER achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction performance with significantly higher efficiency: Compared with MVSNet and CasMVSNet, our MVSTER achieves 34% and 14% relative improvements on the DTU benchmark, with 80% and 51% relative reductions in running time. MVSTER also ranks first on Tanks&Temples-Advanced among all published works. Code is released at https://github.com/JeffWang987.