ElasticMVS: Learning elastic part representation for self-supervised multi-view stereopsis

Self-supervised multi-view stereopsis (MVS) attracts increasing attention for learning dense surface predictions from only a set of images without onerous ground-truth 3D training data for supervision. However, existing methods highly rely on the local photometric consistency, which fails to identify accurately dense correspondence in broad textureless and reflectance areas.In this paper, we show that geometric proximity such as surface connectedness and occlusion boundaries implicitly inferred from images could serve as reliable guidance for pixel-wise multi-view correspondences. With this insight, we present a novel elastic part representation which encodes physically-connected part segmentations with elastically-varying scales, shapes and boundaries. Meanwhile, a self-supervised MVS framework namely ElasticMVS is proposed to learn the representation and estimate per-view depth following a part-aware propagation and evaluation scheme. Specifically, the pixel-wise part representation is trained by a contrastive learning-based strategy, which increases the representation compactness in geometrically concentrated areas and contrasts otherwise. ElasticMVS iteratively optimizes a part-level consistency loss and a surface smoothness loss, based on a set of depth hypotheses propagated from the geometrically concentrated parts. Extensive evaluations convey the superiority of ElasticMVS in the reconstruction completeness and accuracy, as well as the efficiency and scalability. Particularly, for the challenging large-scale reconstruction benchmark, ElasticMVS demonstrates significant performance gain over both the supervised and self-supervised approaches.