  Accurate recovery of 3D geometrical surfaces from calibrated 2D multi-view
images is a fundamental yet active research area in computer vision. Despite
the steady progress in multi-view stereo reconstruction, most existing methods
are still limited in recovering fine-scale details and sharp features while
suppressing noises, and may fail in reconstructing regions with few textures.
To address these limitations, this paper presents a Detail-preserving and
Content-aware Variational (DCV) multi-view stereo method, which reconstructs
the 3D surface by alternating between reprojection error minimization and mesh
denoising. In reprojection error minimization, we propose a novel inter-image
similarity measure, which is effective to preserve fine-scale details of the
reconstructed surface and builds a connection between guided image filtering
and image registration. In mesh denoising, we propose a content-aware
$\ell_{p}$-minimization algorithm by adaptively estimating the $p$ value and
regularization parameters based on the current input. It is much more promising
in suppressing noise while preserving sharp features than conventional
isotropic mesh smoothing. Experimental results on benchmark datasets
demonstrate that our DCV method is capable of recovering more surface details,
and obtains cleaner and more accurate reconstructions than state-of-the-art
methods. In particular, our method achieves the best results among all
published methods on the Middlebury dino ring and dino sparse ring datasets in
terms of both completeness and accuracy.
