  The completeness of 3D models is still a challenging problem in multi-view
stereo (MVS) due to the unreliable photometric consistency in low-textured
areas. Since low-textured areas usually exhibit strong planarity, planar models
are advantageous to the depth estimation of low-textured areas. On the other
hand, PatchMatch multi-view stereo is very efficient for its sampling and
propagation scheme. By taking advantage of planar models and PatchMatch
multi-view stereo, we propose a planar prior assisted PatchMatch multi-view
stereo framework in this paper. In detail, we utilize a probabilistic graphical
model to embed planar models into PatchMatch multi-view stereo and contribute a
novel multi-view aggregated matching cost. This novel cost takes both
photometric consistency and planar compatibility into consideration, making it
suited for the depth estimation of both non-planar and planar regions.
Experimental results demonstrate that our method can efficiently recover the
depth information of extremely low-textured areas, thus obtaining high complete
3D models and achieving state-of-the-art performance.
