Abstract: Stereo matching makes it possible to reproduce a three- dimensional stereo by getting the distance information through pixels. It is one of the fundamental and significant problems in the study of the computer vision. In this paper, choosing the edges as the primitives for matching, the grey values of the edges and the magnitude and direction of the edge gradient and the Laplace values were figured out as the properties of the edge feature points, according to the constraints for stereo matching, the energy function was built. During the process of stereo matching, ant colony optimization algorithm was applied to this problem for finding the route minimizing the energy function. Experiment results show that this algorithm is more stable and it can get the matching result with better accuracy. Key words: Stereo matching; Energy function; Ant colony optimization algorithm