MVP-Stereo: A Parallel Multi-View Patchmatch Stereo Method with Dilation Matching for Photogrammetric Application

Abstract

Multi-view stereo plays an important role in 3D reconstruction but suffers from low reconstruction efficiency and has difficulties reconstructing areas with low or repeated textures. To address this, we propose MVP-Stereo, a novel multi-view parallel patchmatch stereo method. MVP-Stereo employs two key techniques. First, MVP-Stereo utilizes multi-view dilated ZNCC to handle low texture and repeated texture by dynamically adjusting the matching window size based on image variance and using a portion of pixels to calculate matching costs without increasing computational complexity. Second, MVP-Stereo leverages multi-scale parallel patchmatch to reconstruct the depth map for each image in a highly efficient manner, which is implemented by CUDA with random initialization, multi-scale parallel spatial propagation, random refinement, and the coarse-to-fine strategy. Experiments on the Strecha dataset, the ETH3D benchmark, and the UAV dataset demonstrate that MVP-Stereo can achieve competitive reconstruction quality compared to state-of-the-art methods with the highest reconstruction efficiency. For example, MVP-Stereo outperforms COLMAP in reconstruction quality by around 30% of reconstruction time, and achieves around 90% of the quality of ACMMP and SD-MVS in only around 20% of the time. In summary, MVP-Stereo can efficiently reconstruct high-quality point clouds and meet the requirements of several photogrammetric applications, such as emergency relief, infrastructure inspection, and environmental monitoring.