Dynamic programming is one of the oldest but still popular methods for stereo correspondence.Because the traditional stereo matching based on the dynamic programming has the well-known horizontal “streaking” effect for skiping the vertical edges,a stereo correspondence using the multi-stage dynamic programming is proposed to eliminate this effect in this paper.Firstly,the initial disparity space is constructed,and the down and up dynamic programming processes are operated across the epipolar lines.Then,the initial disparity space is optimized by the combined results above.Finally,based on the new disparity space,the forward and backward dynamic programming processes are implemented along the epipolar lines,and the disparities are obtained by minimizing the combined results of the dynamic programming along and across the epipolar lines.This algorithm is evaluated on the benchmark Middlebury database.The experimental results show that the “streaking” effect is suppressed and the general error matching rates have decreased by 28.60% and 40.42% respectively compared with that of the traditional dynamic programming algorithm and the scan-line optimization algorithm,which can offer a good trade off in terms of the accuracy.It is demonstrated that the proposed algorithm is more efficient.