In order to improve the efficiency of stereo matching and resolve the problem caused by discontinuity of the disparities in one region

new pixel\|set based stereo matching algorithm using belief propagation is proposed in this paper. Firstly

the initial disparity estimate is evaluated by hierarchical belief propagation in pixel domain. Secondly

the reference image is segmented in turn according to color and disparity information. Thirdly

the segmented pixel\|sets are fitted to a set of planes based on the strategy of splitting and merging

which can eliminate the mistakes due to color segmentation. Finally

the ultimate disparity estimate is achieved in the pixel\|set domain by employing standard belief propagation. Experiments on the international benchmark demonstrate that the performance of our algorithm is comparable to the state\|of\|the\|art stereo algorithms on various data sets.