A key issue in performing stereo reconstruction is to find stereo correspondences. For this purpose, a novel unified framework for arbitrary area based correlation methods is presented. The commonly neglected problem of ambiguities is addressed and a solution based on relaxation of match candidates is introduced. The method comes with the major benefits of a reverse matching step at almost no extra computational cost. The results of one match direction are used to select match candidates. Then these candidates are correlated backward with a different method. The proposed framework does not require any initial estimation. Experiments are performed on ground truth under varying geometric and varying noise conditions. Finally, the method is compared to a number of well-known techniques.