Recently, renovations of plant equipment have been more frequent because of the shortened lifespans of the products, and as-built models from large-scale laser-scanned data is expected to streamline rebuilding processes. However, the laser-scanned data of an existing plant has an enormous amount of points, captures intricate objects, and includes a high noise level, so the manual reconstruction of a 3D model is very time-consuming and costly. Among plant equipment, piping systems account for the greatest proportion. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to propose an algorithm which could automatically recognize a piping system from the terrestrial laser-scanned data of plant equipment. The straight portion of pipes, connecting parts, and connection relationship of the piping system can be recognized in this algorithm. Normal-based region growing and cylinder surface fitting can extract all possible locations of pipes, including straight pipes, elbows, and junctions. Tracing the axes of a piping system enables the recognition of the positions of these elements and their connection relationship. Using only point clouds, the recognition algorithm can be performed in a fully automatic way. The algorithm was applied to large-scale scanned data of an oil rig and a chemical plant. Recognition rates of about 86%, 88%, and 71% were achieved straight pipes, elbows, and junctions, respectively.