# MonSter++: Unified Stereo Matching, Multi-view Stereo, and Real-time Stereo with Monodepth Priors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.08643 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08643/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 82 of its 118 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 82)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Towards Robust Monocular Depth Estimation: Mixing Datasets for Zero-shot Cross-dataset Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01341/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Depth Map Prediction from a Single Image using a Multi-Scale Deep Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2283/) (2014)
- [A Large Dataset to Train Convolutional Networks for Disparity, Optical Flow, and Scene Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02134/) (2015)
- [MVSNet: Depth Inference for Unstructured Multi-view Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02505/) (2018)
- [Deep Ordinal Regression Network for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02446/) (2018)
- [AdaBins: Depth Estimation using Adaptive Bins](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14141/) (2020)
- [TartanAir: A Dataset to Push the Limits of Visual SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14338/) (2020)
- [Pyramid Stereo Matching Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08669/) (2018)
- [Cascade Cost Volume for High-Resolution Multi-View Stereo and Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06378/) (2019)
- [Deeper Depth Prediction with Fully Convolutional Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00373/) (2016)
- [From Big to Small: Multi-Scale Local Planar Guidance for Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10326/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Learning of Geometry and Context for Deep Stereo Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04309/) (2017)
- [RAFT-Stereo: Multilevel Recurrent Field Transforms for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07547/) (2021)
- [Omnidata: A Scalable Pipeline for Making Multi-Task Mid-Level Vision Datasets from 3D Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04994/) (2021)
- [Unifying Flow, Stereo and Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05783/) (2022)
- [Recurrent MVSNet for High-resolution Multi-view Stereo Depth Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10556/) (2019)
- [GA-Net: Guided Aggregation Net for End-to-end Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06587/) (2019)
- [Group-wise Correlation Stereo Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04025/) (2019)
- [Enforcing geometric constraints of virtual normal for depth prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12209/) (2019)
- [AANet: Adaptive Aggregation Network for Efficient Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09548/) (2020)
- [Practical Stereo Matching via Cascaded Recurrent Network with Adaptive Correlation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11483/) (2022)
- [Iterative Geometry Encoding Volume for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06615/) (2023)
- [DeepV2D: Video to Depth with Differentiable Structure from Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04605/) (2018)
- [Hierarchical Neural Architecture Search for Deep Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13501/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [DEFOM-Stereo: Depth Foundation Model Based Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09466/) (2025)
- [Pixel-Perfect Depth with Semantics-Prompted Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07316/) (2025)
- [Diving into the Fusion of Monocular Priors for Generalized Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14414/) (2025)
- [FlowSeek: Optical Flow Made Easier with Depth Foundation Models and Motion Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05297/) (2025)
- [TruckDrive: Long-Range Autonomous Highway Driving Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02413/) (2026)
- [DEPTHOR: Depth Enhancement from a Practical Light-Weight dToF Sensor and RGB Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01596/) (2025)
- [NTIRE 2025 Challenge on HR Depth from Images of Specular and Transparent Surfaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05815/) (2025)
- [WAFT-Stereo: Warping-Alone Field Transforms for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24836/) (2026)
- [A Wavelet-based Stereo Matching Framework for Solving Frequency Convergence Inconsistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18024/) (2025)
- [Pixel-Optimization-Free Patch Attack on Stereo Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17632/) (2025)
- [The Role of Cyclopean-Eye in Stereo Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20900/) (2025)
- [Towards Understanding 3D Vision: the Role of Gaussian Curvature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11825/) (2025)
- [MatchAttention: Embedding Explicit Matching Constraints into Attention for Efficient Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14260/) (2025)
- [Pip-Stereo: Progressive Iterations Pruner for Iterative Optimization based Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20496/) (2026)
- [Geometry Reinforced Efficient Attention Tuning Equipped with Normals for Robust Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09142/) (2026)
- [GemDepth: Geometry-Embedded Features for 3D-Consistent Video Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.10525/) (2026)
- [Lite Any Stereo V2: Faster and Stronger Efficient Zero-Shot Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24457/) (2026)
- [URS-Stereo: Uncertainty-Guided Residual Search for Real-Time Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06779/) (2026)
- [SeasonStereo: Robust Dense Stereo Matching for Multi-Date Satellite Imagery via Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27139/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce MonSter++, a geometric foundation model for multi-view depth estimation, unifying rectified stereo matching and unrectified multi-view stereo. Both tasks fundamentally recover metric depth from correspondence search and consequently face the same dilemma: struggling to handle ill-posed regions with limited matching cues. To address this, we propose MonSter++, a novel method that integrates monocular depth priors into multi-view depth estimation, effectively combining the complementary strengths of single-view and multi-view cues. MonSter++ fuses monocular depth and multi-view depth into a dual-branched architecture. Confidence-based guidance adaptively selects reliable multi-view cues to correct scale ambiguity in monocular depth. The refined monocular predictions, in turn, effectively guide multi-view estimation in ill-posed regions. This iterative mutual enhancement enables MonSter++ to evolve coarse object-level monocular priors into fine-grained, pixel-level geometry, fully unlocking the potential of multi-view depth estimation. MonSter++ achieves new state-of-the-art on both stereo matching and multi-view stereo. By effectively incorporating monocular priors through our cascaded search and multi-scale depth fusion strategy, our real-time variant RT-MonSter++ also outperforms previous real-time methods by a large margin. As shown in Fig.1, MonSter++ achieves significant improvements over previous methods across eight benchmarks from three tasks -- stereo matching, real-time stereo matching, and multi-view stereo, demonstrating the strong generality of our framework. Besides high accuracy, MonSter++ also demonstrates superior zero-shot generalization capability. We will release both the large and the real-time models to facilitate their use by the open-source community.