TRUST-Stereo: Teacher-Assisted Robust Uncertainty-Guided Search and Transfer for Fast Stereo Matching

Coarse-to-fine stereo matching enables efficient disparity estimation but remains sensitive to errors in propagated disparity, which may place ground-truth correspondences outside subsequent local search ranges. We propose TRUST-Stereo (Teacher-Assisted Robust Uncertainty-Guided Search and Transfer for Fast Stereo Matching), which addresses this limitation through an Uncertainty-Guided Residual Search Module (UGRSM). UGRSM estimates the reliability of propagated disparity and predicts residual offsets to adaptively relocate local cost-volume centers. Additionally, we introduce a two-stage Senior-Junior Teacher Assistant knowledge distillation strategy to transfer rich monocular representations from a large foundation model to a lightweight backbone to achieve fast stereo matching performance. Experiments on KITTI 2012, KITTI 2015, ETH3D, and Middlebury demonstrate strong zero-shot generalization. Using only 1.4M synthetic stereo pairs, TRUST-Stereo achieves state-of-the-art results on several benchmark metrics, outperforming competing efficient methods trained with substantially larger datasets, including real-world pseudo-labeled samples. Specifically, it achieves a KITTI 2015 EPE of 0.93, ETH3D Bad 1.0 of 2.13% and Middlebury Bad 2.0 of 6.79% while maintaining inference at approximately 50 ms per stereo pair.