WAVE-Stereo: Warp-Aligned Volume Encoding for Stereo Matching

Existing iterative stereo matching methods primarily adopt two types of correspondence representation: explicit matching search via correlation volumes and local residual refinement via warped features, yet the two remain separately modeled. We propose WAVE-Stereo, built on a core insight: correlation volumes and feature warping provide complementary matching cues. GeoWarp Correspondence Encoder (GWCE) encodes matching search, residual alignment, and disparity prior in parallel at the ConvGRU input. To mitigate matching degradation in textureless regions, we propose Periodic Global Context Propagation (PGCP), which propagates global spatial information in a periodic manner. On five real-world benchmarks -- Middlebury, ETH3D, KITTI 2012, KITTI 2015, and Booster -- WAVE-Stereo achieves competitive zero-shot generalization accuracy without any external foundation model prior, achieving 3.18% D1-all on KITTI 2015, 4.42% Bad-2.0 on Booster, and 66ms real-time inference, striking a favorable balance between accuracy and efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/yamanoko-do/WAVE-Stereo.