Existing area-based stereo matching algorithms utilize a single rectangular correlation area for computing cross-correlation between corresponding points in stereo images, and compute disparity by finding the peak in the vicinity of depth discontinuity, since, because of inconstnat disparities around discontinuities, the cross-correlation becomes low in such area. Inthis paper, a new area-based matching strategy is proposed exploiting multiple directional correlation masks instead of a single one. The proposed technique computes multiple cross-covariance functions using each oriented mask. Peaks are detected from each covariance function and the disparity is computed by choosing the location with the highest covariance value. Proposed approach can also be applied to compute disparity gradients without obtaining dense depth data. A number of examples are presented using synthetic and natural stereo images.