Pose variation is a critical problem in face recognition. Three-dimensional(3D) face recognition techniques have been proposed, as 3D data contains depth information that may allow problems of pose variation to be handled more effectively than with 2D face recognition methods. This paper proposes a pose-normalized 3D face modeling method that translates and rotates any pose angle to a frontal pose using a plane fitting method by Singular Value Decomposition(SVD). First, we reconstruct 3D face data with stereo vision method. Second, nose peak point is estimated by depth information and then the angle of pose is estimated by a facial plane fitting algorithm using four facial features. Next, using the estimated pose angle, the 3D face is translated and rotated to a frontal pose. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we designed 2D and 3D face recognition experiments. The experimental results show that the performance of the normalized 3D face recognition method is superior to that of an un-normalized 3D face recognition method for overcoming the problems of pose variation.