As three-dimensional range scanners make large point clouds a more common initial representation of real world objects, a need arises for algorithms that can efficiently process point sets. In this paper, we present a method for extracting smooth surfaces from dense point clouds. Given an unorganized set of points in space as input, our algorithm first uses principal component analysis to estimate the surface variation at each point. After defining conditions for determining the geometric compatibility of a point and a surface, we examine the points in order of increasing surface variation to find points whose neighborhoods can be closely approximated by a single surface. These neighborhoods become seed regions for region growing. The region growing step clusters points that are geometrically compatible with the approximating surface and refines the surface as the region grows to obtain the best approximation of the largest number of points. When no more points can be added to a region, the algorithm stores the extracted surface. Our algorithm works quickly with little user interaction and requires a fraction of the memory needed for a standard mesh data structure. To demonstrate its usefulness, we show results on large point clouds acquired from real-world objects.