Benchmarking stereo reconstruction for 3D printable Martian terrain models

Aerial navigation on Mars requires vision-based pipelines that are robust to the diverse illumination conditions and terrain morphology of the Martian surface. A key bottleneck for training and evaluating such methods is the scarcity of large-scale, annotated aerial datasets. We present MARTIAN, an open-source Blender-based rendering framework that leverages real HiRISE orbital map products to synthesize realistic aerial views of the Martian terrain under controllable lighting conditions and at varying altitudes. MARTIAN generates observations with accurate pose annotations, directly addressing the scarcity of training data for vision-based navigation on Mars. The framework has been validated through its deployment in concurrent work on map-based localization systems for Ingenuity and future Mars rotorcraft, where synthetically trained deep image matchers were successfully evaluated on real Mars imagery. MARTIAN is publicly available at: https://github.com/nasa-jpl/martian.

Stereo matching is a fundamental task in 3D reconstruction. Despite remarkable advances, the prevailing paradigms formulate stereo matching as a deterministic regression problem, collapsing the multimodal distribution modeling into a single-point estimation. This formulation suffers from a regression-to-mean bias, frequently struggling with ambiguous regions. In contrast, we introduce a prior-guided generative framework that integrates deterministic matching regression and generative distribution modeling within a complementary formulation. Built upon this formulation, we introduce StereoFlow through three key components: (i) a two-stage progressive cascade matching network that progressively produces multi-resolution stereo conditions with complementary matching cues; (ii) a pixel diffusion transformer (termed StereoDiT) with a frequency-decoupled architecture for modeling correspondence ambiguity; (iii) a few-step flow matching objective (termed Transition Flow Matching) for efficient optimization. In summary, \textsc{\textbf{StereoFlow}} achieves strong geometric consistency and rich fine-grained details in ill-posed, discontinuous regions and under zero-shot generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed StereoFlow establishes multiple state-of-the-art results across benchmarks, including Scene Flow, KITTI, ETH3D, and Middlebury.

Accurate 3D reconstruction from satellite imagery typically relies on near-simultaneous stereo pairs, limiting its applicability to diachronic settings where multi-date images exhibit varying seasonal and illumination conditions. Training dense stereo matching models robust to appearance changes is a long-standing challenge, as aligned multi-date imagery and ground-truth geometry are costly to obtain at scale. We propose SeasonStereo, a scalable framework that addresses disparity estimation from diachronic satellite images by training on synthetic image pairs with controlled seasonal appearance variation, while leveraging zero-shot geometric priors from foundation models. SeasonStereo matches the accuracy of state-of-the-art LiDAR-supervised models, while producing sharper geometric details without requiring aligned real multi-date training products or LiDAR-derived labels. As a result, SeasonStereo offers a practical path toward large-scale 3D reconstruction from heterogeneous satellite images with reduced supervision cost.