# Boosting Multi-view Stereo with Late Cost Aggregation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11751 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11751/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [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)
- [Recurrent MVSNet for High-resolution Multi-view Stereo Depth Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10556/) (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)
- [TransMVSNet: Global Context-aware Multi-view Stereo Network with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14600/) (2021)
- [Multi-Scale Geometric Consistency Guided Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08103/) (2019)
- [SimpleRecon: 3D Reconstruction Without 3D Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.14743/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Depth Estimation for Multi-View Stereo: A Unified Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.01501/) (2022)
- [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)
- [MVSFormer: Multi-View Stereo by Learning Robust Image Features and Temperature-based Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02541/) (2022)
- [Learning to Fuse Monocular and Multi-view Cues for Multi-frame Depth Estimation in Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08993/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [GoMVS: Geometrically Consistent Cost Aggregation for Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07992/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Pairwise matching cost aggregation is a crucial step for modern learning-based Multi-view Stereo (MVS). Prior works adopt an early aggregation scheme, which adds up pairwise costs into an intermediate cost. However, we analyze that this process can degrade informative pairwise matchings, thereby blocking the depth network from fully utilizing the original geometric matching cues. To address this challenge, we present a late aggregation approach that allows for aggregating pairwise costs throughout the network feed-forward process, achieving accurate estimations with only minor changes of the plain CasMVSNet. Instead of building an intermediate cost by weighted sum, late aggregation preserves all pairwise costs along a distinct view channel. This enables the succeeding depth network to fully utilize the crucial geometric cues without loss of cost fidelity. Grounded in the new aggregation scheme, we propose further techniques addressing view order dependence inside the preserved cost, handling flexible testing views, and improving the depth filtering process. Despite its technical simplicity, our method improves significantly upon the baseline cascade-based approach, achieving comparable results with state-of-the-art methods with favorable computation overhead.