# A Comparison of Multi-View Stereo Methods for Photogrammetric 3D Reconstruction: From Traditional to Learning-Based Approaches

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10246 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10246/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [MVSNet: Depth Inference for Unstructured Multi-view Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02505/) (2018)
- [Cascade Cost Volume for High-Resolution Multi-View Stereo and Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06378/) (2019)
- [Fast3R: Towards 3D Reconstruction of 1000+ Images in One Forward Pass](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13928/) (2025)
- [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)
- [PatchmatchNet: Learned Multi-View Patchmatch Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01411/) (2020)
- [FoundationStereo: Zero-Shot Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09898/) (2025)
- [Stereo4D: Learning How Things Move in 3D from Internet Stereo Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09621/) (2024)
- [Pyramid Multi-view Stereo Net with Self-adaptive View Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03001/) (2019)
- [Learning View Priors for Single-view 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.10719/) (2018)
- [An Evaluation of DUSt3R/MASt3R/VGGT 3D Reconstruction on Photogrammetric Aerial Blocks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14798/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Photogrammetric 3D reconstruction has long relied on traditional Structure-from-Motion (SfM) and Multi-View Stereo (MVS) methods, which provide high accuracy but face challenges in speed and scalability. Recently, learning-based MVS methods have emerged, aiming for faster and more efficient reconstruction. This work presents a comparative evaluation between a representative traditional MVS pipeline (COLMAP) and state-of-the-art learning-based approaches, including geometry-guided methods (MVSNet, PatchmatchNet, MVSAnywhere, MVSFormer++) and end-to-end frameworks (Stereo4D, FoundationStereo, DUSt3R, MASt3R, Fast3R, VGGT). Two experiments were conducted on different aerial scenarios. The first experiment used the MARS-LVIG dataset, where ground-truth 3D reconstruction was provided by LiDAR point clouds. The second experiment used a public scene from the Pix4D official website, with ground truth generated by Pix4Dmapper. We evaluated accuracy, coverage, and runtime across all methods. Experimental results show that although COLMAP can provide reliable and geometrically consistent reconstruction results, it requires more computation time. In cases where traditional methods fail in image registration, learning-based approaches exhibit stronger feature-matching capability and greater robustness. Geometry-guided methods usually require careful dataset preparation and often depend on camera pose or depth priors generated by COLMAP. End-to-end methods such as DUSt3R and VGGT achieve competitive accuracy and reasonable coverage while offering substantially faster reconstruction. However, they exhibit relatively large residuals in 3D reconstruction, particularly in challenging scenarios.