1. An automated system for three-dimensional recovery of an object placed inside the field of view of a plurality of cameras, comprising: an illumination and image acquisition apparatus configured for the acquisition of reciprocal stereo images of said object without physical movement of said plurality of cameras; a computational apparatus programmed to recover depth data of said object from said reciprocal stereo images, wherein said depth data can be recovered regardless of the reflectance properties of said object; wherein said computational apparatus is further programmed to perform automatic calibration of said system based on a plurality of stereo calibration images; and wherein the light sources are allocated out of the optical center positions such that different reciprocity ratios of image intensities are obtained.