# Learning-based Multi-View Stereo: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.15235 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15235/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 172 of its 261 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 172)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [NeuS: Learning Neural Implicit Surfaces by Volume Rendering for Multi-view Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10689/) (2021)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [Objaverse: A Universe of Annotated 3D Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08051/) (2022)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [Convolutional LSTM Network: A Machine Learning Approach for Precipitation Nowcasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.04214/) (2015)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [On the Properties of Neural Machine Translation: Encoder-Decoder Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1259/) (2014)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [Efficient Geometry-aware 3D Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07945/) (2021)
- [EfficientNetV2: Smaller Models and Faster Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.00298/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [MVSAnywhere: Zero-Shot Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22430/) (2025)
- [GaSLight: Gaussian Splats for Spatially-Varying Lighting in HDR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10809/) (2025)
- [QuickSplat: Fast 3D Surface Reconstruction via Learned Gaussian Initialization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05591/) (2025)
- [Ov3R: Open-Vocabulary Semantic 3D Reconstruction from RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22052/) (2025)
- [SparseSplat: Towards Applicable Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting with Pixel-Unaligned Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03069/) (2026)
- [GENA3D: Generative Amodal 3D Modeling by Bridging 2D Priors and 3D Coherence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21945/) (2025)
- [VAD-GS: Visibility-Aware Densification for 3D Gaussian Splatting in Dynamic Urban Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09364/) (2025)
- [RocSync: Millisecond-Accurate Temporal Synchronization for Heterogeneous Camera Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.14948/) (2025)
- [PerfCam: Digital Twinning for Production Lines Using 3D Gaussian Splatting and Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.18165/) (2025)
- [UniFField: A Generalizable Unified Neural Feature Field for Visual, Semantic, and Spatial Uncertainties in Any Scene](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06754/) (2025)
- [MVS-TTA: Test-Time Adaptation for Multi-View Stereo via Meta-Auxiliary Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18120/) (2025)
- [Urban Neural Surface Reconstruction from Constrained Sparse Aerial Imagery with 3D SAR Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22045/) (2026)
- [MGP-KAD: Multimodal Geometric Priors and Kolmogorov-Arnold Decoder for Single-View 3D Reconstruction in Complex Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06158/) (2026)
- [PAGaS: Pixel-Aligned 1DoF Gaussian Splatting for Depth Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22129/) (2026)
- [ActMVS: Active Scene Reconstruction with Monocular Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01367/) (2026)
- [MAGiSt3R: Multi-Agent Feed-forward 3D Reconstruction from Monocular RGB Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15211/) (2026)
- [ZipMVS: Multi-View Stereo with Compressed Cost Volumes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28033/) (2026)
- [TV-SGS: Gaussian Splatting with Geometric Information Propagation via Tensor Voting under sparse views](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07734/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D reconstruction aims to recover the dense 3D structure of a scene. It plays an essential role in various applications such as Augmented/Virtual Reality (AR/VR), autonomous driving and robotics. Leveraging multiple views of a scene captured from different viewpoints, Multi-View Stereo (MVS) algorithms synthesize a comprehensive 3D representation, enabling precise reconstruction in complex environments. Due to its efficiency and effectiveness, MVS has become a pivotal method for image-based 3D reconstruction. Recently, with the success of deep learning, many learning-based MVS methods have been proposed, achieving impressive performance against traditional methods. We categorize these learning-based methods as: depth map-based, voxel-based, NeRF-based, 3D Gaussian Splatting-based, and large feed-forward methods. Among these, we focus significantly on depth map-based methods, which are the main family of MVS due to their conciseness, flexibility and scalability. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of the literature at the time of this writing. We investigate these learning-based methods, summarize their performances on popular benchmarks, and discuss promising future research directions in this area.