Abstract: A new area-based stereo matching approach in rank transform domain is proposed in this paper.First，stereo image pairs are mapped from the gray-level space to rank space to eliminate the interference due to the environment variations and dissimilar characteristics of different cameras.Based on the assumption that most objects interested in a picture have similar depths of fields，a two-level stereo matching is processed in the rank domain.The global disparity is first estimated in the maximum window and then the relative disparity is estimated.The final disparity is the sum of global disparity and relative disparity.The experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm can effectively reduce the error matching rate and is better than the classical area-based stereo matching algorithm.