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This paper proposes an area-based stereo algorithm suitable to real time applications. The core of the algorithm relies on the uniqueness constraint and on a matching process that rejects previous matches as soon as more reliable ones are found. The proposed approach is also compared with bidirectional matching (BM), since the latter is the basic method for detecting unreliable matches in most area-based stereo algorithms. We describe the algorithm''s matching core, the additional constraints introduced to improve the reliability and the computational optimizations carried out to achieve a very fast implementation. We provide a large set of experimental results, obtained on a standard set of images with ground-truth as well as on stereo sequences, and computation time measurements. These data are used to evaluate the proposed algorithm and compare it with a well-known algorithm based on BM. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]