DEVICE FOR PROCESSING STEREO IMAGES, METHOD FOR PROCESSING STEREO IMAGES, AND PROGRAM

A stereo image processing apparatus comprises: three cameras (11a) to (11c); a parallax detecting unit for long distance (21) for performing matching between images picked up by the camera (11a) and the camera (11c) to determine correspondence regions and for detecting a deviation between positions in both the images in the correspondence regions as a long-distance parallax Pf; a parallax detecting unit for short distance (22) for performing matching between images picked up by the camera (11b) and the camera (11c) to determine correspondence regions and for detecting a deviation between positions in both the images in the correspondence regions as a second parallax; a parallax combining unit (31) for combining the first parallax and the second parallax; and a distance calculating unit (313) for calculating, a distance to an object corresponding to the region based on the combined parallax.