# SurfaceNet+: An End-to-end 3D Neural Network for Very Sparse Multi-view Stereopsis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.12690 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12690/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 May 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [NeuralRecon: Real-Time Coherent 3D Reconstruction from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00681/) (2021)
- [SparseNeuS: Fast Generalizable Neural Surface Reconstruction from Sparse Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05737/) (2022)
- [NeuralUDF: Learning Unsigned Distance Fields for Multi-view Reconstruction of Surfaces with Arbitrary Topologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14173/) (2022)
- [VoRTX: Volumetric 3D Reconstruction With Transformers for Voxelwise View Selection and Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00236/) (2021)
- [PlanarRecon: Real-time 3D Plane Detection and Reconstruction from Posed Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07710/) (2022)
- [G3PT: Unleash the power of Autoregressive Modeling in 3D Generation via Cross-scale Querying Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06322/) (2024)
- [2S-UDF: A Novel Two-stage UDF Learning Method for Robust Non-watertight Model Reconstruction from Multi-view Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15368/) (2023)
- [NeuralRoom: Geometry-Constrained Neural Implicit Surfaces for Indoor Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06853/) (2022)
- [IB-MVS: An Iterative Algorithm for Deep Multi-View Stereo based on Binary Decisions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14420/) (2021)
- [Neural Surface Reconstruction from Sparse Views Using Epipolar Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04301/) (2024)
- [From Transparent to Opaque: Rethinking Neural Implicit Surfaces with α-NeuS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05362/) (2024)
- [ES-MVSNet: Efficient Framework for End-to-end Self-supervised Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02191/) (2023)
- [Generalizable Neural Reconstruction of High-Fidelity Surfaces via Sparse Volumetric Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.05952/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-view stereopsis (MVS) tries to recover the 3D model from 2D images. As the observations become sparser, the significant 3D information loss makes the MVS problem more challenging. Instead of only focusing on densely sampled conditions, we investigate sparse-MVS with large baseline angles since the sparser sensation is more practical and more cost-efficient. By investigating various observation sparsities, we show that the classical depth-fusion pipeline becomes powerless for the case with a larger baseline angle that worsens the photo-consistency check. As another line of the solution, we present SurfaceNet+, a volumetric method to handle the 'incompleteness' and the 'inaccuracy' problems induced by a very sparse MVS setup. Specifically, the former problem is handled by a novel volume-wise view selection approach. It owns superiority in selecting valid views while discarding invalid occluded views by considering the geometric prior. Furthermore, the latter problem is handled via a multi-scale strategy that consequently refines the recovered geometry around the region with the repeating pattern. The experiments demonstrate the tremendous performance gap between SurfaceNet+ and state-of-the-art methods in terms of precision and recall. Under the extreme sparse-MVS settings in two datasets, where existing methods can only return very few points, SurfaceNet+ still works as well as in the dense MVS setting. The benchmark and the implementation are publicly available at https://github.com/mjiUST/SurfaceNet-plus.