COMPARISON OF STATE-OF-THE-ART MULTI-VIEW STEREO SOLUTIONS FOR CLOSE RANGE HERITAGE DOCUMENTATION

Abstract. In recent years novel 3D reconstruction methods have been developed to improve the conventional image-based point cloud generation techniques. These novel methods generally attempt to address various challenges encountered in conventional methods, namely, the reconstruction of reflective surfaces and the amount of processing time required, both of which are major bottlenecks in heritage documentation and especially those related to large and complex objects. In this paper, we identified three types of 3D image-based reconstruction techniques and tested their usage on heritage datasets, namely (1) conventional multi-view stereo (MVS), (2) learning-based MVS, and (3) neural radiance fields (NeRF). The aim of this study is to determine the capabilities of these methods in reconstruction of three different heritage-related datasets with different challenges. Our results show that conventional MVS is nowadays a reliable solution for 3D reconstruction, in many instances recording good results relative to the reference terrestrial laser scans (TLS) when properly deployed. When applied to a challenging highly reflective scene, conventional MVS fared well using the PatchMatch algorithm (reaching an object completeness rate of 99.05%), while NeRF’s best performance was 99.98%. However, NeRF suffered from noisy data, some of which may stem from its radiance field-to-point cloud conversion method. The results show that there is great potential in using specific methods for specific cases, and research in combining them may yield interesting results in the future.