Efficient and comfortable acquisition of large 3D scenes is an important topic for many current and future applications in the field of robotics, factory and office visualization, 3DTV and cultural heritage.

In this paper we present both an omnidirectional stereo vision approach for 3D modeling based on graph cut techniques and also a new mobile 3D model acquisition platform where it is employed. The platform comprises a panoramic camera and a 2D laser range scanner for self localization by scan matching. 3D models are acquired just by moving the platform around and recording images in regular intervals. Additionally, we concurrently build 3D models using two supplementary laser range scanners. This enables the investigation of the stereo algorithm?s quality by comparing it with the laser scanner based 3D model as ground truth. This offers a more objective point of view on the achieved 3D model quality.