Stereo technology has been widely used in visual navigation systems.Traditional stereo vision navigation systems usually use local method because of the real-time requirement.The accuracy of the results by local method

however

is very low and it can not be used in high performance vision navigation systems.In this paper we propose a novel fast stereo matching algorithm

which utilizes the segmentation information on the epipolar lines to form a tree and get optimized results by using tree dynamic programming procedure.The proposed algorithm can both use much of the relation information between neighboring pixels to achieve a more accurate matching result

and reduce the number of vertices to be solved so that the system becomes very efficient.Experimental results have shown that our algorithm can get good results comparable to the global MRF-based algorithms

while the executing time is much shorter than the latter.Our algorithm is a fast algorithm which can provide reliable 3D information for vision navigation.