In computer vision, what does MVS do that SFM can't? : <p>I'm a dev with about a decade of enterprise software engineering under his belt, and my hobbyist interests have steered me into the vast and scary realm of computer vision (CV).</p>

<p>One thing that is not immediately clear to me is the division of labor between <strong>Structure from Motion (SFM)</strong> tools and <strong>Multi View Stereo (MVS)</strong> tools.</p>

<p>Specifically, <a href="http://www.di.ens.fr/cmvs/" rel="noreferrer">CMVS</a> appears to be the best-in-show MVS tool, and <a href="http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~snavely/bundler/" rel="noreferrer">Bundler</a> seems to be one of the better open source SFM tools out there.</p>

<p>Taken from CMVS's own homepage:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>You should ALWAYS use CMVS after Bundler and before PMVS2</p>
</blockquote>

<p>I'm wondering: <strong>why?!?</strong> My <em>understanding</em> of SFM tools is that they perform the 3D reconstruction for you, so why do we need MVS tools in the first place? What value/processing/features do they add that SFM tools like Bundler can't address? Why the proposed pipeline of:</p>

<pre><code>Bundler -&gt; CMVS -&gt; PMVS2
</code></pre>

<p>?</p>
