Robust and Unbiased Foreground / Background Energy for Multi-view Stereo

This paper revisits the graph-cuts based approach for solving the multi-view stereo problem, and proposes a novel foreground / background energy which is shown to be unbiased and robust against noisy depth maps. Unlike most existing works which focus on deriving a robust photo-consistency energy, this paper targets at deriving a robust and unbiased foreground / background energy. By introducing a novel data-dependent foreground / background energy, we show that it is possible to recover the object surface from noisy depth maps even in the absence of the photo-consistency energy. This demonstrates that the foreground / background energy is equally important as the photo-consistency energy in graph-cuts based methods. Experiments on real data sequences further show that high quality reconstructions can be achieved using our proposed foreground / background energy with a very simple photo-consistency energy.