MARMVS: Matching Ambiguity Reduced Multiple View Stereo for Efficient Large Scale Scene Reconstruction

The ambiguity in image matching is one of main factors decreasing the quality of the 3D model reconstructed by PatchMatch based multiple view stereo. In this paper, we present a novel method, matching ambiguity reduced multiple view stereo (MARMVS) to address this issue. The MARMVS handles the ambiguity in image matching process with three newly proposed strategies: 1) The matching ambiguity is measured by the differential geometry property of image surface with epipolar constraint, which is used as a critical criterion for optimal scale selection of every single pixel with corresponding neighbouring images. 2) The depth of every pixel is initialized to be more close to the true depth by utilizing the depths of its surrounding sparse feature points, which yields faster convergency speed in the following PatchMatch stereo and alleviates the ambiguity introduced by self similar structures of the image. 3) In the last propagation of the PatchMatch stereo, higher priorities are given to those planes with the related 2D image patch possesses less ambiguity, this strategy further propagates a correctly reconstructed surface to raw texture regions. In addition, the proposed method is very efficient even running on consumer grade CPUs, due to proper parameterization and discretization in the depth map computation step. The MARMVS is validated on public benchmarks, and experimental results demonstrate competing performance against the state of the art.