# Generalized Binary Search Network for Highly-Efficient Multi-View Stereo

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.02338 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02338/

## Key facts

- Cited by 32 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Dec 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [MVSNet: Depth Inference for Unstructured Multi-view Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02505/) (2018)
- [BlendedMVS: A Large-scale Dataset for Generalized Multi-view Stereo Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10127/) (2019)
- [Cascade Cost Volume for High-Resolution Multi-View Stereo and Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06378/) (2019)
- [DeepMVS: Learning Multi-view Stereopsis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00650/) (2018)
- [Recurrent MVSNet for High-resolution Multi-view Stereo Depth Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10556/) (2019)
- [Group-wise Correlation Stereo Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04025/) (2019)
- [PatchmatchNet: Learned Multi-View Patchmatch Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01411/) (2020)
- [Cost Volume Pyramid Based Depth Inference for Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08329/) (2019)
- [Deep Stereo using Adaptive Thin Volume Representation with Uncertainty Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.12012/) (2019)
- [Point-Based Multi-View Stereo Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04422/) (2019)
- [SurfaceNet: An End-to-end 3D Neural Network for Multiview Stereopsis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01749/) (2017)
- [DPSNet: End-to-end Deep Plane Sweep Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00538/) (2019)
- [Multi-Scale Geometric Consistency Guided Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08103/) (2019)
- [Fast-MVSNet: Sparse-to-Dense Multi-View Stereo With Learned Propagation and Gauss-Newton Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13017/) (2020)
- [Visibility-aware Multi-view Stereo Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07928/) (2020)
- [Dense Hybrid Recurrent Multi-view Stereo Net with Dynamic Consistency Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10872/) (2020)
- [AA-RMVSNet: Adaptive Aggregation Recurrent Multi-view Stereo Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03824/) (2021)
- [Learning Inverse Depth Regression for Multi-View Stereo with Correlation Cost Volume](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11746/) (2019)
- [MVS2D: Efficient Multi-view Stereo via Attention-Driven 2D Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13325/) (2021)
- [A Skeleton-bridged Deep Learning Approach for Generating Meshes of Complex Topologies from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04704/) (2019)
- [PVSNet: Pixelwise Visibility-Aware Multi-View Stereo Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07714/) (2020)
- [SkeletonNet: A Topology-Preserving Solution for Learning Mesh Reconstruction of Object Surfaces from RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05742/) (2020)
- [Self Paced Deep Learning for Weakly Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07651/) (2016)
- [BP-MVSNet: Belief-Propagation-Layers for Multi-View-Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12436/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [MVSFormer: Multi-View Stereo by Learning Robust Image Features and Temperature-based Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02541/) (2022)
- [MVSFormer++: Revealing the Devil in Transformer's Details for Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11673/) (2024)
- [RC-MVSNet: Unsupervised Multi-View Stereo with Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03949/) (2022)
- [MVSAnywhere: Zero-Shot Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22430/) (2025)
- [Learning to Fuse Monocular and Multi-view Cues for Multi-frame Depth Estimation in Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08993/) (2023)
- [WT-MVSNet: Window-based Transformers for Multi-view Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14319/) (2022)
- [Learning-based Multi-View Stereo: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15235/) (2024)
- [Improving Transformer-based Image Matching by Cascaded Capturing Spatially Informative Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.02885/) (2023)
- [When Epipolar Constraint Meets Non-local Operators in Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17218/) (2023)
- [TSAR-MVS: Textureless-aware Segmentation and Correlative Refinement Guided Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09990/) (2023)
- [GC-MVSNet: Multi-View, Multi-Scale, Geometrically-Consistent Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19583/) (2023)
- [FoVA-Depth: Field-of-View Agnostic Depth Estimation for Cross-Dataset Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13786/) (2024)
- [CHOSEN: Contrastive Hypothesis Selection for Multi-View Depth Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02225/) (2024)
- [CL-MVSNet: Unsupervised Multi-view Stereo with Dual-level Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08219/) (2025)
- [Learning Heterogeneous Mixture of Scene Experts for Large-scale Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02005/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Disparity: A Depth Range Free Multi-View Stereo Based on Disparity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16905/) (2022)
- [DELS-MVS: Deep Epipolar Line Search for Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06626/) (2022)
- [A Global Depth-Range-Free Multi-View Stereo Transformer Network with Pose Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01893/) (2024)
- [MonoMVSNet: Monocular Priors Guided Multi-View Stereo Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11333/) (2025)
- [Multi-View Stereo Representation Revisit: Region-Aware MVSNet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13614/) (2023)
- [CT-MVSNet: Efficient Multi-View Stereo with Cross-scale Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08594/) (2023)
- [Radiant Triangle Soup with Soft Connectivity Forces for 3D Reconstruction and Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23642/) (2025)
- [ES-MVSNet: Efficient Framework for End-to-end Self-supervised Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02191/) (2023)
- [V-FUSE: Volumetric Depth Map Fusion with Long-Range Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08715/) (2023)
- [GSDC Transformer: An Efficient and Effective Cue Fusion for Monocular Multi-Frame Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17059/) (2023)
- [Prism: Semi-Supervised Multi-View Stereo with Monocular Structure Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05771/) (2024)
- [Detail-aware multi-view stereo network for depth estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23684/) (2025)
- [Boosting Multi-View Stereo with Depth Foundation Model in the Absence of Real-World Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11845/) (2025)
- [Dense Geometry Supervision for Underwater Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18233/) (2025)
- [Blending 3D Geometry and Machine Learning for Multi-View Stereopsis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03470/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Multi-view Stereo (MVS) with known camera parameters is essentially a 1D search problem within a valid depth range. Recent deep learning-based MVS methods typically densely sample depth hypotheses in the depth range, and then construct prohibitively memory-consuming 3D cost volumes for depth prediction. Although coarse-to-fine sampling strategies alleviate this overhead issue to a certain extent, the efficiency of MVS is still an open challenge. In this work, we propose a novel method for highly efficient MVS that remarkably decreases the memory footprint, meanwhile clearly advancing state-of-the-art depth prediction performance. We investigate what a search strategy can be reasonably optimal for MVS taking into account of both efficiency and effectiveness. We first formulate MVS as a binary search problem, and accordingly propose a generalized binary search network for MVS. Specifically, in each step, the depth range is split into 2 bins with extra 1 error tolerance bin on both sides. A classification is performed to identify which bin contains the true depth. We also design three mechanisms to respectively handle classification errors, deal with out-of-range samples and decrease the training memory. The new formulation makes our method only sample a very small number of depth hypotheses in each step, which is highly memory efficient, and also greatly facilitates quick training convergence. Experiments on competitive benchmarks show that our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with much less memory. Particularly, our method obtains an overall score of 0.289 on DTU dataset and tops the first place on challenging Tanks and Temples advanced dataset among all the learning-based methods. The trained models and code will be released at https://github.com/MiZhenxing/GBi-Net.