A system and a method are disclosed for a structured-light system to estimate depth in an image. An image is received in which the image is of a scene onto which a reference light pattern has been projected. The projection of the reference light pattern includes a predetermined number of particular sub-patterns. A patch of the received image and a sub-pattern of the reference light pattern are matched based on either a hardcode template matching technique or a probability that the patch corresponds to the sub-pattern. If a lookup table is used, the table may be a probability matrix, may contain precomputed correlations scores or may contain precomputed class IDs. An estimate of depth of the patch is determined based on a disparity between the patch and the sub-pattern.