# Multiview Stereo with Cascaded Epipolar RAFT

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.04502 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04502/

## Key facts

- Cited by 51 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [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)
- [RAFT-Stereo: Multilevel Recurrent Field Transforms for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07547/) (2021)
- [Recurrent MVSNet for High-resolution Multi-view Stereo Depth Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10556/) (2019)
- [Learning a Multi-View Stereo Machine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05375/) (2017)
- [Cost Volume Pyramid Based Depth Inference for Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08329/) (2019)
- [Stereo Matching by Training a Convolutional Neural Network to Compare Image Patches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.05970/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Learning to Compare Image Patches via Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.03641/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Computing the Stereo Matching Cost with a Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4326/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Planar Prior Assisted PatchMatch Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11744/) (2019)
- [Pyramid Multi-view Stereo Net with Self-adaptive View Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03001/) (2019)
- [TAPA-MVS: Textureless-Aware PAtchMatch Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10929/) (2019)
- [DeepC-MVS: Deep Confidence Prediction for Multi-View Stereo Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00439/) (2019)
- [IB-MVS: An Iterative Algorithm for Deep Multi-View Stereo based on Binary Decisions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14420/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [VGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11651/) (2025)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [Metric3Dv2: A Versatile Monocular Geometric Foundation Model for Zero-shot Metric Depth and Surface Normal Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15506/) (2024)
- [Unifying Flow, Stereo and Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05783/) (2022)
- [GaussianPro: 3D Gaussian Splatting with Progressive Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14650/) (2024)
- [Iterative Geometry Encoding Volume for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06615/) (2023)
- [FLARE: Feed-forward Geometry, Appearance and Camera Estimation from Uncalibrated Sparse Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12138/) (2025)
- [SEA-RAFT: Simple, Efficient, Accurate RAFT for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14793/) (2024)
- [Infinite Photorealistic Worlds using Procedural Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09310/) (2023)
- [Infinigen Indoors: Photorealistic Indoor Scenes using Procedural Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11824/) (2024)
- [Pow3R: Empowering Unconstrained 3D Reconstruction with Camera and Scene Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17316/) (2025)
- [GS2Mesh: Surface Reconstruction from Gaussian Splatting via Novel Stereo Views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01810/) (2024)
- [MoCha-Stereo: Motif Channel Attention Network for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06842/) (2024)
- [Matrix3D: Large Photogrammetry Model All-in-One](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07685/) (2025)
- [On-the-fly Reconstruction for Large-Scale Novel View Synthesis from Unposed Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05558/) (2025)
- [WAFT: Warping-Alone Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21526/) (2025)
- [VGGT-Omega](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.15195/) (2026)
- [UC-NeRF: Neural Radiance Field for Under-Calibrated Multi-view Cameras in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16945/) (2023)
- [Playing to Vision Foundation Model's Strengths in Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06261/) (2024)
- [View Synthesis with Sculpted Neural Points](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05869/) (2022)
- [Test3R: Learning to Reconstruct 3D at Test Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13750/) (2025)
- [Learning-based Multi-View Stereo: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15235/) (2024)
- [Self-Evolving Depth-Supervised 3D Gaussian Splatting from Rendered Stereo Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07456/) (2024)
- [Scene4U: Hierarchical Layered 3D Scene Reconstruction from Single Panoramic Image for Your Immerse Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00387/) (2025)
- [ASGrasp: Generalizable Transparent Object Reconstruction and 6-DoF Grasp Detection from RGB-D Active Stereo Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05648/) (2024)
- [DoubleTake: Geometry Guided Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18387/) (2024)
- [JOG3R: Towards 3D-Consistent Video Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01409/) (2025)
- [Unposed 3DGS Reconstruction with Probabilistic Procrustes Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18541/) (2025)
- [Fin3R: Fine-tuning Feed-forward 3D Reconstruction Models via Monocular Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22429/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We address multiview stereo (MVS), an important 3D vision task that reconstructs a 3D model such as a dense point cloud from multiple calibrated images. We propose CER-MVS (Cascaded Epipolar RAFT Multiview Stereo), a new approach based on the RAFT (Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms) architecture developed for optical flow. CER-MVS introduces five new changes to RAFT: epipolar cost volumes, cost volume cascading, multiview fusion of cost volumes, dynamic supervision, and multiresolution fusion of depth maps. CER-MVS is significantly different from prior work in multiview stereo. Unlike prior work, which operates by updating a 3D cost volume, CER-MVS operates by updating a disparity field. Furthermore, we propose an adaptive thresholding method to balance the completeness and accuracy of the reconstructed point clouds. Experiments show that our approach achieves competitive performance on DTU (the second best among known results) and state-of-the-art performance on the Tanks-and-Temples benchmark (both the intermediate and advanced set). Code is available at https://github.com/princeton-vl/CER-MVS