System and method for progressive stereo matching of digital images representing a scene. In general, the progressive stereo matching system includes an initialization module, that obtains a set of previous unambiguous matches of pixels within the digital images, and a search range module, that determines a search range in the first and second digital images to look for a candidate pixel match. The progressive stereo matching system also includes a correlation module, that computes a correlation score between the candidate pixel match, and a classification module, that classifies the pixel match based on its correlation score.