This paper addresses the problem of 3D surface reconstruction using image sequences. It has been shown that shape recovery from three or more occluding contours of the surface is possible given a known camera motion. Several algorithms, which have been recently proposed, allow such a reconstruction under the assumption of a linear camera motion. A new approach is presented which deals with the reconstruction problem directly from a discrete point of view. First, a theoretical study of the epipolar correspondence between occluding contours is achieved. A correct depth formulation is then derived from a local approximation of the surface up to order two. This allows the local shape to be estimated, given three consecutive contours, without any constraints on the camera motion. Experimental results are presented for both synthetic and real data.