The present invention comprises a method and an apparatus for three dimensional modeling to allow dense depth maps to be recovered, without previous knowledge of the surface reflectance, from only a single pair of stereo images. Several initial steps are performed for stereo and radiometric calibration and rectification for obtaining accurate results. The apparatus for the stereo images acquisition includes internal light sources, these are automatically commuted by a illumination control in order to fulfill the reciprocity property, a stereo camera head composed by the necessary optics to acquire the reciprocal stereo images and a compatible PC interface. The invention is faster than other systems since it requires only two images for obtaining a dense depth model of objects with an arbitrary surface reflectance distribution allowing the system to be used in a wide range of applications such as metrology, quality control, medical and dynamic three dimensional modeling.