1. A stochastic method for fast stereoscopic ranging comprising: (a) selecting a pair of images for stereo processing, wherein the pair of images are a frame pair and one of the image is a reference frame; (b) seeding estimated values for a range metric at each pixel of the reference frame; (c) initializing one or more search stage constraints; (d) stochastically computing local influence for each valid pixel in the reference frame, wherein a valid pixel is a pixel in the reference frame that has a corresponding pixel in the other frame of the frame pair; (e) aggregating local influences for each valid pixel in the reference frame; (f) refining the estimated values for the range metric at each valid pixel in the reference frame based on the aggregated local influence; and (g) post-processing range metric data; and (h) repeating n iterations of (d) through (g), wherein n is a value selected in (c).