# TiS-TSL: Image-Label Supervised Surgical Video Stereo Matching via Time-Switchable Teacher-Student Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.06817 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06817/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Pyramid Stereo Matching Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08669/) (2018)
- [RAFT-Stereo: Multilevel Recurrent Field Transforms for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07547/) (2021)
- [Group-wise Correlation Stereo Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04025/) (2019)
- [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)
- [DynamicStereo: Consistent Dynamic Depth from Stereo Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02296/) (2023)
- [Attention Concatenation Volume for Accurate and Efficient Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02146/) (2022)
- [Stereo Correspondence and Reconstruction of Endoscopic Data Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01133/) (2021)
- [Selective-Stereo: Adaptive Frequency Information Selection for Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00486/) (2024)
- [Endo-Depth-and-Motion: Reconstruction and Tracking in Endoscopic Videos using Depth Networks and Photometric Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16525/) (2021)
- [Semi-Supervised Brain Lesion Segmentation with an Adapted Mean Teacher Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.01248/) (2019)
- [Temporally Consistent Online Depth Estimation in Dynamic Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09337/) (2021)
- [Match-Stereo-Videos: Bidirectional Alignment for Consistent Dynamic Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10755/) (2024)
- [Stereo Dense Scene Reconstruction and Accurate Localization for Learning-Based Navigation of Laparoscope in Minimally Invasive Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03912/) (2021)
- [Bidirectional Semi-supervised Dual-branch CNN for Robust 3D Reconstruction of Stereo Endoscopic Images via Adaptive Cross and Parallel Supervisions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08291/) (2022)
- [Consistency-aware Self-Training for Iterative-based Stereo Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23747/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Stereo matching in minimally invasive surgery (MIS) is essential for next-generation navigation and augmented reality. Yet, dense disparity supervision is nearly impossible due to anatomical constraints, typically limiting annotations to only a few image-level labels acquired before the endoscope enters deep body cavities. Teacher-Student Learning (TSL) offers a promising solution by leveraging a teacher trained on sparse labels to generate pseudo labels and associated confidence maps from abundant unlabeled surgical videos. However, existing TSL methods are confined to image-level supervision, providing only spatial confidence and lacking temporal consistency estimation. This absence of spatio-temporal reliability results in unstable disparity predictions and severe flickering artifacts across video frames. To overcome these challenges, we propose TiS-TSL, a novel time-switchable teacher-student learning framework for video stereo matching under minimal supervision. At its core is a unified model that operates in three distinct modes: Image-Prediction (IP), Forward Video-Prediction (FVP), and Backward Video-Prediction (BVP), enabling flexible temporal modeling within a single architecture. Enabled by this unified model, TiS-TSL adopts a two-stage learning strategy. The Image-to-Video (I2V) stage transfers sparse image-level knowledge to initialize temporal modeling. The subsequent Video-to-Video (V2V) stage refines temporal disparity predictions by comparing forward and backward predictions to calculate bidirectional spatio-temporal consistency. This consistency identifies unreliable regions across frames, filters noisy video-level pseudo labels, and enforces temporal coherence. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that TiS-TSL exceeds other image-based state-of-the-arts by improving TEPE and EPE by at least 2.11% and 4.54%, respectively.