ZipMVS: Multi-View Stereo with Compressed Cost Volumes
Authors: Guanglin Jin, Hongshan Yu, Javier Civera, Zhaoxin Li
Organizations: School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China · I3A, Universidad de Zaragoza, Zaragoza 50018, Spain · Agricultural Information Institute, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing 100081, China Key Laboratory of Agricultural Big Data, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Beijing 100081, China
Multi-view stereo (MVS) methods typically deliver highly accurate 3D reconstructions from multiple registered RGB images, thanks to the highly informative, geometric constraints between them. However, their substantial memory requirements remain a major obstacle for deployment in domains such as aerospace and autonomous systems, where resource efficiency is critical. In this work, we introduce ZipMVS, an MVS method specifically designed for efficient high-quality reconstruction. We propose a novel depth-hypothesis strategy that enables substantial compression of the cost volume, hence greatly reducing GPU memory consumption while preserving reconstruction accuracy. Experiments on the DTU and Tanks and Temples datasets show that ZipMVS achieves competitive reconstruction quality compared with other efficiency-oriented MVS methods, while achieving a competitive balance between reconstruction quality and GPU memory usage. The code is available at https://github.com/JihnGlyn/ZipMVS
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of ZipMVS. Multi-view images are first processed by the feature extractor. Depth estimation begins at level 3, and in subsequent levels, new depth hypotheses are generated using the confidence and depth maps from the previous level. The final refined depth map is produced as the output.
Figure 2: Demonstration of the Advanced Depth Hypothesis Strategy, which contains a Differentiable Depth Range module (DDR) and a GRU-based Depth Speculator module (GDS).
Methods
Acc.(mm)↓
Comp.(mm)↓
Overall (mm)↓
Camp [ 40 ]
0.935
0.554
0.695
Furu [ 11 ]
0.613
0.941
0.777
Tola [ 41 ]
0.342
1.190
0.766
Gipuma [ 18 ]
0.283
0.873
0.578
MVSNet [ 4 ]
0.396
0.527
0.462
R-MVSNet [ 27 ]
0.383
0.452
0.417
Table 1: Results for baselines and ZipMVS on DTU. The lower the better for accuracy (Acc.), completeness (Comp.), and overall. Best result is bolded, and second-best is in italic bold. The first horizontal line separates traditional (above) from learning-based (below) methods.
Figure 3: Qualitative reconstruction results of our ZipMVS on the 22 subsets of the DTU test set.
Figure 4: Depth maps generated by PatchmatchNet [ 8 ] ( 2nd column), IterMVS [ 7 ] ( 3rd column), and our ZipMVS ( 4th column) for scan1 ( 1st row), scan48 ( 2nd row), and scan77 ( 3rd row) of the DTU dataset.
Methods
Intermediate Dataset
Advanced Dataset
Precision↑
Recall↑
F-score↑
Precision↑
Recall↑
F-score↑
Colmap [ 19 ]
43.16
44.48
42.14
33.65
23.96
27.24
MVSNet [ 4 ]
40.23
49.70
43.48
-
-
-
R-MVSNet [ 27 ]
43.74
57.60
48.40
31.47
22.05
24.91
Point-MVSNet [ 6 ]
41.27
60.13
48.27
-
-
-
CasMVSNet [ 10 ]
47.62
74.01
56.84
29.68
35.24
31.12
Table 2: Results on Tanks and Temples for baselines trained only on DTU. The higher the better for precision, recall and F-score.
Figure 5: Depth maps (first row) and point clouds (second row) estimated by PatchmatchNet [ 8 ] (left column), IterMVS [ 7 ] (central column), and our ZipMVS (right column) on the Auditorium set of Tanks and Temples.
Methods
Mem.(MB)
Runtime(s)
Overall(mm)↓
CasMVSNet [ 10 ]
4591
-
0.355
PatchmatchNet [ 8 ]
1629
0.139
0.352
IterMVS [ 7 ]
886
0.093
0.363
ZipMVS (5 views)
1322
0.112
0.340
Table 3: Comparison of several methods in terms of memory usage, run-time on the DTU dataset. Bold and italic bold indicate the best and the second-best, respectively.
Figure 6: Overall error (mm) and GPU memory usage (MB) of several MVS baselines and our ZipMVS on the DTU dataset at an input resolution of 1152×1600 . Points closer to the lower-left corner indicate a better trade-off between reconstruction quality and memory footprint. ZipMVS stands out as a practical alternative: it is surpassed only by MVSFormer++ [ 45 ] , yet requires over 3× less GPU memory. Compared to the remaining baselines, ZipMVS delivers superior accuracy while achieving competitive memory efficiency compared to many existing methods.
Figure 7: Reconstruction results on our in-house synthetic dataset. The first row shows the output of PatchmatchNet [ 8 ] , while the second row shows the reconstruction produced by our ZipMVS. Note the higher quality of ZipMVS results, in particular in the parts framed in red.
Methods
Acc.(mm)↓
Comp.(mm)↓
Overall(mm)↓
w/o AR & CD
0.383
0.383
0.383
w/o AR
0.352
0.351
0.352
w/o CD
0.362
0.366
0.364
ZipMVS (ours)
0.369
0.284
0.327
Table 4: Ablation study evaluating the impact of the Adaptive Range (AR) and Central Densely Interval (CD) modules on depth hypotheses generation.
Figure 8: (a) Reference image. (b) The range map produced by ARNet. (c) The eccentricity map, eccentricity between the depth speculated by the GDS module and the previous estimated depth. The brighter the area, the higher the value, and vice versa.
Level 2
Level 1
Acc.(mm)↓
Comp.(mm)↓
Overall(mm)↓
C
C
0.352
0.373
0.362
S
C
0.342
0.364
0.353
C
S
0.336
0.363
0.349
S
S
0.333
0.346
0.340
Table 5: Ablation study concerning the effects of GRU-based Depth Speculator (GDS) module. Symbols S and C denote configurations with the speculated depth (GDS) and compensated depth, respectively. The number of input views N is set to 5 .
N
Acc.(mm)↓
Comp.(mm)↓
Overall(mm)↓
Mem.(MB)
Runtime(s)
2
0.4617
0.2424
0.3520
1102
0.075
3
0.4650
0.2354
0.3502
1175
0.088
4
0.3692
0.2840
0.3266
1250
0.096
5
0.3331
0.3460
0.3396
1322
0.112
6
0.3341
0.3448
0.3395
1396
0.125
Table 6: Ablation study on the number of input views N on DTU.
Feed-forward transformer models have driven rapid progress in 3D vision, but state-of-the-art methods such as VGGT and π3 have a computational cost that scales quadratically with the number of input images, making them inefficient when applied to large image collections. Sequential-reconstruction approaches reduce this cost but sacrifice reconstruction quality. We introduce ZipMap, a stateful feed-forward model that achieves linear-time, bidirectional 3D reconstruction while matching or surpassing the accuracy of quadratic-time methods. ZipMap employs test-time training layers to zip an entire image collection into a compact hidden scene state in a single forward pass, enabling reconstruction of over 700 frames in under 10 seconds on a single H100 GPU, more than 20× faster than state-of-the-art methods such as VGGT. Moreover, we demonstrate the benefits of having a stateful representation in real-time scene-state querying and its extension to sequential streaming reconstruction.
Haian Jin, Rundi Wu, Tianyuan Zhang +4
Google DeepMind · Cornell University · Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Real-world 3D reconstruction pipelines often rely on multi-view images degraded by lossy compression. While compression artifacts have been extensively studied in single-image or video restoration, their impact on multi-view geometry remains largely overlooked. In this work, we identify compression-induced cross-view geometric inconsistency as a critical failure mode, where view-dependent artifacts disrupt feature matching, dense correspondence, camera parameter estimation, and downstream 3D reconstruction tasks such as novel view synthesis. To address this problem, we propose CompMVR, a compression-aware multi-view diffusion restoration framework that jointly refines compressed views while preserving cross-view consistency, and construct compressed datasets for systematic evaluation. Unlike conventional restoration methods that optimize each image independently for 2D perceptual quality, CompMVR leverages learned compression priors and cross-view correspondence to recover visual details while improving geometric reliability across views. Experiments across diverse datasets, codecs, and compression levels demonstrate gains in restoration quality and downstream 3D tasks, including novel-view synthesis, camera pose estimation, and view matching. These results establish compressed multi-view restoration as a distinct problem and highlight its importance for 3D reconstruction under lossy compression. Code and data for this paper are available at https://mchaewon.github.io/CompMVR-project-page/.
Dong-hwi Kim, Chaewon Moon, Hojun Song +13
Kyungpook National University, Republic of Korea · Adobe Research, USA
Real-time 3D perception is crucial for robotics, augmented reality, and embodied intelligence applications. Existing multi-view stereo (MVS) methods primarily rely on geometric correspondences, which often fail in textureless or repetitive regions, while monocular depth models leverage strong image-level priors but lack robust multi-view geometric constraints. More importantly, in robotics and embodied manipulation scenarios, high-quality 3D geometry is not only essential for static reconstruction, but also serves as a critical foundation for learning temporally consistent 4D representations. To obtain visual representations with stronger structural awareness and greater potential for spatiotemporal extension, we present LiteMVS, a lightweight multi-view depth estimation model that integrates plane-sweep geometric reasoning with strong monocular semantic and structural priors. The central idea of LiteMVS is to efficiently inject high-level monocular knowledge, obtained from lightweight segmentation models and large-scale vision foundation models, into a multi-view stereo framework. In particular, LiteMVS enriches the cost volume with semantic descriptors and employs a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) formulation to enable adaptive geometric aggregation across depth hypotheses. Moreover, geometric priors distilled from vision foundation models further strengthen monocular guidance without increasing inference cost. Through this design, LiteMVS not only improves depth estimation and 3D reconstruction quality in static scenes, but also provides a more reliable geometric foundation for subsequent temporal modeling and 4D representation learning. Experiments on ScanNetv2 and 7-Scenes demonstrate that LiteMVS achieves high-quality depth prediction and 3D reconstruction while maintaining competitive efficiency.
Tianbao Zhang, Zeyu Liu, Shuyu Wu +4
Shanghai Key Laboratory of Intelligent Sensing and Recognition, Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Dim12 AI Inc · Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Future Blockchain and Privacy Computing, School of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University