# PlaneFormers: From Sparse View Planes to 3D Reconstruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.04307 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04307/

## Key facts

- Cited by 26 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Aug 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Occupancy Networks: Learning 3D Reconstruction in Function Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03828/) (2018)
- [pixelNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields from One or Few Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02190/) (2020)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [SuperGlue: Learning Feature Matching with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11763/) (2019)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [ORB-SLAM: a Versatile and Accurate Monocular SLAM System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.00956/) (2015)
- [LoFTR: Detector-Free Local Feature Matching with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00680/) (2021)
- [A Point Set Generation Network for 3D Object Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00603/) (2016)
- [MVSNeRF: Fast Generalizable Radiance Field Reconstruction from Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15595/) (2021)
- [MegaDepth: Learning Single-View Depth Prediction from Internet Photos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00607/) (2018)
- [IBRNet: Learning Multi-View Image-Based Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.13090/) (2021)
- [DROID-SLAM: Deep Visual SLAM for Monocular, Stereo, and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10869/) (2021)
- [Pixel2Mesh: Generating 3D Mesh Models from Single RGB Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01654/) (2018)
- [BARF: Bundle-Adjusting Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06405/) (2021)
- [3D-R2N2: A Unified Approach for Single and Multi-view 3D Object Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.00449/) (2016)
- [Predicting Depth, Surface Normals and Semantic Labels with a Common Multi-Scale Convolutional Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4734/) (2014)
- [Semantic Scene Completion from a Single Depth Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.08974/) (2016)
- [Putting NeRF on a Diet: Semantically Consistent Few-Shot View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00677/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Human Pose and Mesh Reconstruction with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09760/) (2020)
- [Local Implicit Grid Representations for 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08981/) (2020)
- [SynSin: End-to-end View Synthesis from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08804/) (2019)
- [DeepMVS: Learning Multi-view Stereopsis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00650/) (2018)
- [NeuralRecon: Real-Time Coherent 3D Reconstruction from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00681/) (2021)
- [Deep Global Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11540/) (2020)
- [Image Matching across Wide Baselines: From Paper to Practice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01587/) (2020)
- [DeMoN: Depth and Motion Network for Learning Monocular Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02401/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [The 8-Point Algorithm as an Inductive Bias for Relative Pose Prediction by ViTs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.08988/) (2022)
- [Last-Mile Embodied Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11746/) (2022)
- [NOPE-SAC: Neural One-Plane RANSAC for Sparse-View Planar 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16799/) (2022)
- [AirPlanes: Accurate Plane Estimation via 3D-Consistent Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08960/) (2024)
- [PlanarSplatting: Accurate Planar Surface Reconstruction in 3 Minutes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03451/) (2024)
- [Structural Multiplane Image: Bridging Neural View Synthesis and 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05937/) (2023)
- [FAR: Flexible, Accurate and Robust 6DoF Relative Camera Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03221/) (2024)
- [G4Splat: Geometry-Guided Gaussian Splatting with Generative Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12099/) (2025)
- [PlaneRecTR++: Unified Query Learning for Joint 3D Planar Reconstruction and Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13756/) (2023)
- [3DFIRES: Few Image 3D REconstruction for Scenes with Hidden Surface](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08768/) (2024)
- [Extreme Rotation Estimation in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07096/) (2024)
- [AlphaTablets: A Generic Plane Representation for 3D Planar Reconstruction from Monocular Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19950/) (2024)
- [Planar Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01931/) (2024)
- [Towards In-the-wild 3D Plane Reconstruction from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02493/) (2025)
- [PlanarNeRF: Online Learning of Planar Primitives with Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00871/) (2023)
- [SRPose: Two-view Relative Pose Estimation with Sparse Keypoints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08199/) (2024)
- [PLANA3R: Zero-shot Metric Planar 3D Reconstruction via Feed-Forward Planar Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18714/) (2025)
- [MonoPlane: Exploiting Monocular Geometric Cues for Generalizable 3D Plane Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01226/) (2024)
- [Co-VisiON: Co-Visibility ReasONing on Sparse Image Sets of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16805/) (2025)
- [PixCuboid: Room Layout Estimation from Multi-view Featuremetric Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04659/) (2025)
- [3D detection of roof sections from a single satellite image and application to LOD2-building reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05409/) (2023)
- [Neural Mesh Fusion: Unsupervised 3D Planar Surface Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16739/) (2024)
- [Indoor 3D Reconstruction with an Unknown Camera-Projector Pair](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01945/) (2024)
- [Interacted Planes Reveal 3D Line Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01296/) (2026)
- [LoCUS: Learning Multiscale 3D-consistent Features from Posed Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01095/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present an approach for the planar surface reconstruction of a scene from images with limited overlap. This reconstruction task is challenging since it requires jointly reasoning about single image 3D reconstruction, correspondence between images, and the relative camera pose between images. Past work has proposed optimization-based approaches. We introduce a simpler approach, the PlaneFormer, that uses a transformer applied to 3D-aware plane tokens to perform 3D reasoning. Our experiments show that our approach is substantially more effective than prior work, and that several 3D-specific design decisions are crucial for its success.