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While operating a vehicle in either autonomous or occupant piloted mode, an array of sensors can be used to guide the vehicle including stereo cameras. The state-of-the-art distance map estimation algorithms, e.g. stereo matching, usually detect corresponding features in stereo images, and estimate disparities to compute the distance map in a scene. However, depending on the image size, content and quality, the feature extraction process can become inaccurate, unstable and slow. In contrast, we employ deep convolutional neural networks, and propose two architectures to estimate distance maps from stereo images. The first architecture is a simple and generic network that identifies which features to extract, and how to combine them in a multi-resolution framework. The second architecture is a more specialized one that extracts local similarity information from two images, which are used for stereo feature matching, and fuses them at multiple resolutions to generate the distance map.