Stereo is a well-known technique for obtaining depth information from digital 
images. Nevertheless, this technique still suffers from a lack in accuracy 
and/or long computation time needed to match stereo images. A new hierarchical 
algorithm using an image pyramid for obtaining dense depth maps from color 
stereo images is presented. We show that matching results of high quality are 
obtained when using the new hierarchical chromatic Block Matching algorithm. 
Most stereo matching algorithms can not compute correct dense depth maps in 
homogenous image regions. This paper shows that using an active color 
illumination will considerably improve the quality of the matching results. We 
present results for synthetic and for real images.