# Boosting Multi-View Stereo with Depth Foundation Model in the Absence of Real-World Labels

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.11845 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11845/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Hypersim: A Photorealistic Synthetic Dataset for Holistic Indoor Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02523/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Depth-Regularized Optimization for 3D Gaussian Splatting in Few-Shot Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13398/) (2023)
- [Cost Volume Pyramid Based Depth Inference for Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08329/) (2019)
- [TransMVSNet: Global Context-aware Multi-view Stereo Network with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14600/) (2021)
- [Foundational Models Defining a New Era in Vision: A Survey and Outlook](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13721/) (2023)
- [Multi-Scale Geometric Consistency Guided Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08103/) (2019)
- [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)
- [MVSFormer++: Revealing the Devil in Transformer's Details for Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11673/) (2024)
- [Learning Unsupervised Multi-View Stereopsis via Robust Photometric Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02706/) (2019)
- [Generalized Binary Search Network for Highly-Efficient Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02338/) (2021)
- [Self-supervised Multi-view Stereo via Effective Co-Segmentation and Data-Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05374/) (2021)
- [Digging into Uncertainty in Self-supervised Multi-view Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12966/) (2021)
- [MVS^2: Deep Unsupervised Multi-view Stereo with Multi-View Symmetry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11526/) (2019)
- [RC-MVSNet: Unsupervised Multi-View Stereo with Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03949/) (2022)
- [M^3VSNet: Unsupervised Multi-metric Multi-view Stereo Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00363/) (2020)
- [Self-supervised Learning of Depth Inference for Multi-view Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02972/) (2021)
- [KD-MVS: Knowledge Distillation Based Self-supervised Learning for Multi-view Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.10425/) (2022)
- [GoMVS: Geometrically Consistent Cost Aggregation for Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07992/) (2024)
- [DS-MVSNet: Unsupervised Multi-view Stereo via Depth Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06674/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Learning-based Multi-View Stereo (MVS) methods have made remarkable progress in recent years. However, how to effectively train the network without using real-world labels remains a challenging problem. In this paper, driven by the recent advancements of vision foundation models, a novel method termed DFM-MVS, is proposed to leverage the depth foundation model to generate the effective depth prior, so as to boost MVS in the absence of real-world labels. Specifically, a depth prior-based pseudo-supervised training mechanism is developed to simulate realistic stereo correspondences using the generated depth prior, thereby constructing effective supervision for the MVS network. Besides, a depth prior-guided error correction strategy is presented to leverage the depth prior as guidance to mitigate the error propagation problem inherent in the widely-used coarse-to-fine network structure. Experimental results on DTU and Tanks & Temples datasets demonstrate that the proposed DFM-MVS significantly outperforms existing MVS methods without using real-world labels.