Fast-FoundationStereo: Real-Time Zero-Shot Stereo Matching

Bowen Wen, Shaurya Dewan, Stan Birchfield; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 7513-7524

Stereo foundation models achieve strong zero-shotgeneralization but remain computationally prohibitive forreal-time applications. Efficient stereo architectures, on the other hand, sacrificerobustness for speed and require costly per-domain fine-tuning.To bridge this gap, we present Fast-FoundationStereo, a family of architectures that achieve, for the first time, strong zero-shot generalization at real-time frame rate. We employ a divide-and-conquer acceleration strategy with three components: (1) knowledge distillation to compress the hybrid backbone into a single efficient student; (2) blockwise neural architecture search for automatically discovering optimal cost filtering designs under latency budgets, reducing search complexity exponentially; and (3) structured pruning for eliminating redundancy in the iterative refinement module. Furthermore, we introduce an automatic pseudo-labeling pipeline used to curate 1.4M in-the-wild stereo pairs to supplement synthetic training data and facilitate knowledge distillation. The resulting model can run over 10x faster than FoundationStereo while closely matching its zero-shot accuracy, thus establishing a new state-of-the-art among real-time methods. Project page: https://nvlabs.github.io/Fast-FoundationStereo