Towards Gold-Standard Depth Estimation for Tree Branches in UAV Forestry: Benchmarking Deep Stereo Matching Methods

Autonomous UAV forestry operations require robust depth estimation with strong cross-domain generalization, yet existing evaluations focus on urban and indoor scenarios, leaving a critical gap for vegetation-dense environments. We present the first systematic zero-shot evaluation of eight stereo methods spanning iterative refinement, foundation model, diffusion-based, and 3D CNN paradigms. All methods use officially released pretrained weights (trained on Scene Flow) and are evaluated on four standard benchmarks (ETH3D, KITTI 2012/2015, Middlebury) plus a novel 5,313-pair Canterbury Tree Branches dataset (1920 × 1080). Results reveal scene-dependent patterns: foundation models excel on structured scenes (BridgeDepth: 0.23 px on ETH3D; DEFOM: 4.65 px on Middlebury), while iterative methods show variable cross-benchmark performance (IGEV++: 0.36 px on ETH3D but 6.77 px on Middlebury; IGEV: 0.33 px on ETH3D but 4.99 px on Middlebury). Qualitative evaluation on the Tree Branches dataset establishes DEFOM as the gold-standard baseline for vegetation depth estimation, with superior cross-domain consistency (consistently ranking 1st-2nd across benchmarks, average rank 1.75). DEFOM predictions will serve as pseudo-ground-truth for future benchmarking.