A new algorithm for stereo correspondence and surface reconstruction is presented in this paper. We advances stripe as the matching primitive. The stripe is a special kind of region composed of some adjacent similar scanline segments. Each input image is segmented into stripes and then converted to a stripe adjacency graph. Our method matches stripes and stripe adjacencies globally and adaptively, with stripes being merged or split according to the disparity estimates. A pair of matched stripes constructs a surface patch, and, correspondingly, a pair of matched subgraph presents a smooth surface. Experimental results show that our algorithm is fast and effective.