# Fast-MVSNet: Sparse-to-Dense Multi-View Stereo With Learned Propagation and Gauss-Newton Refinement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.13017 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13017/

## Key facts

- Cited by 105 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 29 Mar 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 105)

- [2D Gaussian Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17888/) (2024)
- [MonoSDF: Exploring Monocular Geometric Cues for Neural Implicit Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00665/) (2022)
- [Magic123: One Image to High-Quality 3D Object Generation Using Both 2D and 3D Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17843/) (2023)
- [MapAnything: Universal Feed-Forward Metric 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13414/) (2025)
- [NeuralRecon: Real-Time Coherent 3D Reconstruction from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00681/) (2021)
- [Gaussian Opacity Fields: Efficient Adaptive Surface Reconstruction in Unbounded Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10772/) (2024)
- [Pixel-Perfect Structure-from-Motion with Featuremetric Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08291/) (2021)
- [Iterative Geometry Encoding Volume for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06615/) (2023)
- [Efficient Neural Radiance Fields for Interactive Free-viewpoint Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01517/) (2021)
- [NeuSG: Neural Implicit Surface Reconstruction with 3D Gaussian Splatting Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00846/) (2023)
- [Sparse4D v2: Recurrent Temporal Fusion with Sparse Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14018/) (2023)
- [GES: Generalized Exponential Splatting for Efficient Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10128/) (2024)
- [BEVStereo: Enhancing Depth Estimation in Multi-view 3D Object Detection with Dynamic Temporal Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10248/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Depth Estimation for Multi-View Stereo: A Unified Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01501/) (2022)
- [Learning Signed Distance Field for Multi-view Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09964/) (2021)
- [IterMVS: Iterative Probability Estimation for Efficient Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05126/) (2021)
- [Multiview Stereo with Cascaded Epipolar RAFT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04502/) (2022)
- [MVSTER: Epipolar Transformer for Efficient Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07346/) (2022)
- [VCR-GauS: View Consistent Depth-Normal Regularizer for Gaussian Surface Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05774/) (2024)
- [Multi-View Depth Estimation by Fusing Single-View Depth Probability with Multi-View Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08177/) (2021)
- [MVS2D: Efficient Multi-view Stereo via Attention-Driven 2D Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13325/) (2021)
- [A Benchmark and a Baseline for Robust Multi-view Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06681/) (2022)
- [R3D3: Dense 3D Reconstruction of Dynamic Scenes from Multiple Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14713/) (2023)
- [VoRTX: Volumetric 3D Reconstruction With Transformers for Voxelwise View Selection and Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00236/) (2021)
- [Generalized Binary Search Network for Highly-Efficient Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02338/) (2021)
- [Self-supervised Multi-view Stereo via Effective Co-Segmentation and Data-Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05374/) (2021)
- [Digging into Uncertainty in Self-supervised Multi-view Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12966/) (2021)
- [GaussianRoom: Improving 3D Gaussian Splatting with SDF Guidance and Monocular Cues for Indoor Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19671/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Fusion of Single-View and Multi-View Depth for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07535/) (2024)
- [PlaneMVS: 3D Plane Reconstruction from Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12082/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Almost all previous deep learning-based multi-view stereo (MVS) approaches focus on improving reconstruction quality. Besides quality, efficiency is also a desirable feature for MVS in real scenarios. Towards this end, this paper presents a Fast-MVSNet, a novel sparse-to-dense coarse-to-fine framework, for fast and accurate depth estimation in MVS. Specifically, in our Fast-MVSNet, we first construct a sparse cost volume for learning a sparse and high-resolution depth map. Then we leverage a small-scale convolutional neural network to encode the depth dependencies for pixels within a local region to densify the sparse high-resolution depth map. At last, a simple but efficient Gauss-Newton layer is proposed to further optimize the depth map. On one hand, the high-resolution depth map, the data-adaptive propagation method and the Gauss-Newton layer jointly guarantee the effectiveness of our method. On the other hand, all modules in our Fast-MVSNet are lightweight and thus guarantee the efficiency of our approach. Besides, our approach is also memory-friendly because of the sparse depth representation. Extensive experimental results show that our method is 5× and 14× faster than Point-MVSNet and R-MVSNet, respectively, while achieving comparable or even better results on the challenging Tanks and Temples dataset as well as the DTU dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/svip-lab/FastMVSNet.