Abstract. In this paper wepresent an algorithm for parameterfree informationpreserving surface restoration. The algorithm is designed for 2.5D and 3D surfaces. The basic idea is to extract noise and signal properties of the data simultaneously by variance-component estimation and use this information for ltering. The variance-component estimation delivers information on how to weigh the in uence of the data dependent term and the stabilizing term in regularization techniques, and therefore no parameter which controls this relation has to be set by the user.