Mukherjee,Jayanta, Das,P.P. and Chatterji,B.N.(1990):
Segmentation of Three-Dimensional Surfaces,
Pattern Recognition Letters, 11(3), 215-223.  Abstract. 
In 3D scene analysis usually the 3D surfaces are segmented into planar and quadratic surface regions. In this paper the concept of a digital neighbourhood plane has been introduced for the segmentation of 3D surfaces into planar regions. The algorithm is simple and is illustrated with the help of several examples.