# Diving into the Fusion of Monocular Priors for Generalized Stereo Matching

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.14414 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14414/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [DUSt3R: Geometric 3D Vision Made Easy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14132/) (2023)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [Can You Trust Your Model's Uncertainty? Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty Under Dataset Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02530/) (2019)
- [A Large Dataset to Train Convolutional Networks for Disparity, Optical Flow, and Scene Flow Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02134/) (2015)
- [Metric3D: Towards Zero-shot Metric 3D Prediction from A Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10984/) (2023)
- [RAFT-Stereo: Multilevel Recurrent Field Transforms for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07547/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Stereo Depth Estimation From a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02910/) (2020)
- [Iterative Geometry Encoding Volume for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06615/) (2023)
- [FoundationStereo: Zero-Shot Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09898/) (2025)
- [Domain-invariant Stereo Matching Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.13287/) (2019)
- [Selective-Stereo: Adaptive Frequency Information Selection for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00486/) (2024)
- [PCW-Net: Pyramid Combination and Warping Cost Volume for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.12797/) (2020)
- [Open Challenges in Deep Stereo: the Booster Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04671/) (2022)
- [MoCha-Stereo: Motif Channel Attention Network for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06842/) (2024)
- [Stereo Anywhere: Robust Zero-Shot Deep Stereo Matching Even Where Either Stereo or Mono Fail](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04472/) (2024)
- [Multi-View Depth Estimation by Fusing Single-View Depth Probability with Multi-View Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08177/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Domain Generalized Stereo Matching Networks from a Feature Consistency Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10887/) (2022)
- [NeRF-Supervised Deep Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17603/) (2023)
- [GraftNet: Towards Domain Generalized Stereo Matching with a Broad-Spectrum and Task-Oriented Feature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00179/) (2022)
- [Learning to Adapt for Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02957/) (2019)
- [Neural Markov Random Field for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11193/) (2024)
- [ITSA: An Information-Theoretic Approach to Automatic Shortcut Avoidance and Domain Generalization in Stereo Matching Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02263/) (2022)
- [Context-Enhanced Stereo Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11719/) (2022)
- [Uncertainty Guided Adaptive Warping for Robust and Efficient Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14071/) (2023)
- [Reversing the cycle: self-supervised deep stereo through enhanced monocular distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07130/) (2020)
- [Matching-space Stereo Networks for Cross-domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07347/) (2020)
- [Learning to Fuse Monocular and Multi-view Cues for Multi-frame Depth Estimation in Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08993/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Fast-FoundationStereo: Real-Time Zero-Shot Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11130/) (2025)
- [PromptStereo: Zero-Shot Stereo Matching via Structure and Motion Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01650/) (2026)
- [Domain Generalized Stereo Matching with Uncertainty-guided Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01303/) (2025)
- [Generalized Geometry Encoding Volume for Real-time Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.06793/) (2025)
- [Geometry Reinforced Efficient Attention Tuning Equipped with Normals for Robust Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09142/) (2026)
- [Bidirectional Cross-Modal Prompting for Event-Frame Asymmetric Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15312/) (2026)
- [LinStereo: Linear-Complexity Global Attention for Multi-Scale Iterative Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.25437/) (2026)
- [LiteMatch: Lightweight Zero-Shot Stereo Matching via Cost Volume Stabilization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31636/) (2026)
- [STEREOFLOW: Progressive Stereo Matching with StereoDiT and Transition Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19986/) (2026)
- [BLASt3R: Bundle Adjustment of Any Image Set with Multi-View Matching and Monocular Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05210/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The matching formulation makes it naturally hard for the stereo matching to handle ill-posed regions like occlusions and non-Lambertian surfaces. Fusing monocular priors has been proven helpful for ill-posed matching, but the biased monocular prior learned from small stereo datasets constrains the generalization. Recently, stereo matching has progressed by leveraging the unbiased monocular prior from the vision foundation model (VFM) to improve the generalization in ill-posed regions. We dive into the fusion process and observe three main problems limiting the fusion of the VFM monocular prior. The first problem is the misalignment between affine-invariant relative monocular depth and absolute depth of disparity. Besides, when we use the monocular feature in an iterative update structure, the over-confidence in the disparity update leads to local optima results. A direct fusion of a monocular depth map could alleviate the local optima problem, but noisy disparity results computed at the first several iterations will misguide the fusion. In this paper, we propose a binary local ordering map to guide the fusion, which converts the depth map into a binary relative format, unifying the relative and absolute depth representation. The computed local ordering map is also used to re-weight the initial disparity update, resolving the local optima and noisy problem. In addition, we formulate the final direct fusion of monocular depth to the disparity as a registration problem, where a pixel-wise linear regression module can globally and adaptively align them. Our method fully exploits the monocular prior to support stereo matching results effectively and efficiently. We significantly improve the performance from the experiments when generalizing from SceneFlow to Middlebury and Booster datasets while barely reducing the efficiency.