Depth estimation is an active research area with the developing of stereo vision in recent years.It is one of the key technologies to resolve the large data of stereo vision communication.Now depth estimation still has some problems,such as occlusion,fuzzy edge,real-time processing,etc.Many algorithms have been proposed base on software,however the performance of the computer configurations limits the software processing speed.The other resolution is hardware design and the great developments of the digital signal processor (DSP),and application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and field programmable gate array (FPGA) provide the opportunity of flexible applications.In this work,by analyzing the procedures of depth estimation,the proper algorithms which can be used in hardware design to execute real-time depth estimation are proposed.The different methods of calibration,matching and post-processing are analyzed based on the hardware design requirements.At last some tests for the algorithm have been analyzed.The results show that the algorithms proposed for hardware design can provide credited depth map for further view synthesis and are suitable for hardware design.