RayMVSNet: Learning Ray-based 1D Implicit Fields for Accurate Multi-View Stereo

Learning-based multi-view stereo (MVS) has by far centered around 3D convolution on cost volumes. Due to the high computation and memory consumption of 3D CNN, the resolution of output depth is often considerably limited. Different from most existing works dedicated to adaptive re-finement of cost volumes, we opt to directly optimize the depth value along each camera ray, mimicking the range (depth) finding of a laser scanner. This reduces the MVS problem to ray-based depth optimization which is much more light-weight than full cost volume optimization. In particular, we propose RayMVSNet which learns sequential prediction of aID implicit field along each camera ray with the zero-crossing point indicating scene depth. This sequential modeling, conducted based on transformer features, essentially learns the epipolar line search in traditional multi-view stereo. We also devise a multi-task learning for better optimization convergence and depth accuracy. Our method ranks top on both the DTU and the Tanks & Temples datasets over all previous learning-based methods, achieving overall reconstruction score of 0.33mm on DTU and f-score of 59.48% on Tanks & Temples.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a ray-based depth optimization method, which directly optimizes the depth value along each camera ray by mimicking the range finding of a laser scanner. Compared to full cost volume optimization, this method is more lightweight and outperforms all previous learning-based methods on two datasets.