An efficient hierarchical technique is presented for obtaining dense stereo 
correspondence using a color image pyramid. We show that matching results of 
high quality are obtained when using the hierarchical chromatic Block Matching 
algorithm. Furthermore, we present some results for parallel implementations for 
the algorithm. Most stereo matching algorithms can not compute correct dense 
maps in homogenous image regions. We show that using an active color 
illumination will considerably improve the quality of the matching result. 
Results are presented for synthetic and for real images.