Abstract: According to the craft of pottery,a pot can be described as a surface of revolution.We calculate the surface normals at every 3D points by fitting planar patches in Plucker coordinates.Based on the basic geometrical relationship between the normals of the sherd surface and the rotation axis of the object,the axis of rotation is estimated under the RANSAC paradigm.Experiments with real data show that the proposed method is quite robust with noise and outlier data points,and fairly good estimation results are obtained.