# SimpleMapping: Real-Time Visual-Inertial Dense Mapping with Deep Multi-View Stereo

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08648 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08648/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [ORB-SLAM3: An Accurate Open-Source Library for Visual, Visual-Inertial and Multi-Map SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11898/) (2020)
- [MVSNet: Depth Inference for Unstructured Multi-view Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02505/) (2018)
- [DROID-SLAM: Deep Visual SLAM for Monocular, Stereo, and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10869/) (2021)
- [Direct Sparse Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02565/) (2016)
- [iMAP: Implicit Mapping and Positioning in Real-Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12352/) (2021)
- [VINS-Mono: A Robust and Versatile Monocular Visual-Inertial State Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.03852/) (2017)
- [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)
- [NeuralRecon: Real-Time Coherent 3D Reconstruction from Monocular Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00681/) (2021)
- [Atlas: End-to-End 3D Scene Reconstruction from Posed Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10432/) (2020)
- [Kimera: an Open-Source Library for Real-Time Metric-Semantic Localization and Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02490/) (2019)
- [CNN-SLAM: Real-time dense monocular SLAM with learned depth prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03489/) (2017)
- [CodeSLAM - Learning a Compact, Optimisable Representation for Dense Visual SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00874/) (2018)
- [Vox-Fusion: Dense Tracking and Mapping with Voxel-based Neural Implicit Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15858/) (2022)
- [Self-supervised Sparse-to-Dense: Self-supervised Depth Completion from LiDAR and Monocular Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00275/) (2018)
- [DeepFactors: Real-Time Probabilistic Dense Monocular SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05049/) (2020)
- [BundleFusion: Real-time Globally Consistent 3D Reconstruction using On-the-fly Surface Re-integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01093/) (2016)
- [DPSNet: End-to-end Deep Plane Sweep Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00538/) (2019)
- [TransformerFusion: Monocular RGB Scene Reconstruction using Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02191/) (2021)
- [Fast-MVSNet: Sparse-to-Dense Multi-View Stereo With Learned Propagation and Gauss-Newton Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13017/) (2020)
- [SimpleRecon: 3D Reconstruction Without 3D Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.14743/) (2022)
- [DeepVideoMVS: Multi-View Stereo on Video with Recurrent Spatio-Temporal Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02177/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Depth Completion with Calibrated Backprojection Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10531/) (2021)
- [MVDepthNet: Real-time Multiview Depth Estimation Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.08563/) (2018)
- [Multi-view Depth Estimation using Epipolar Spatio-Temporal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13118/) (2020)
- [Multi-View Stereo by Temporal Nonparametric Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06397/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [See4D: Pose-Free 4D Generation via Auto-Regressive Video Inpainting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26796/) (2025)
- [NeRF-VO: Real-Time Sparse Visual Odometry with Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13471/) (2023)
- [DoubleTake: Geometry Guided Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18387/) (2024)
- [DAVIO: Dense Monocular-Inertial SLAM with Feed-Forward Initialization and Pose-Conditioned Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27702/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a real-time visual-inertial dense mapping method capable of performing incremental 3D mesh reconstruction with high quality using only sequential monocular images and inertial measurement unit (IMU) readings. 6-DoF camera poses are estimated by a robust feature-based visual-inertial odometry (VIO), which also generates noisy sparse 3D map points as a by-product. We propose a sparse point aided multi-view stereo neural network (SPA-MVSNet) that can effectively leverage the informative but noisy sparse points from the VIO system. The sparse depth from VIO is firstly completed by a single-view depth completion network. This dense depth map, although naturally limited in accuracy, is then used as a prior to guide our MVS network in the cost volume generation and regularization for accurate dense depth prediction. Predicted depth maps of keyframe images by the MVS network are incrementally fused into a global map using TSDF-Fusion. We extensively evaluate both the proposed SPA-MVSNet and the entire visual-inertial dense mapping system on several public datasets as well as our own dataset, demonstrating the system's impressive generalization capabilities and its ability to deliver high-quality 3D mesh reconstruction online. Our proposed dense mapping system achieves a 39.7% improvement in F-score over existing systems when evaluated on the challenging scenarios of the EuRoC dataset.