Abstract. Planar patches are a very compact and stable intermediate representation of 3D scenes, as they are a good starting point for a complete automatic reconstruction of surfaces. This paper presents a novel method for extracting planar patches from an unstructured cloud of points that is produced by a typical structure and motion pipeline. The method integrates several constraints inside J-linkage, a robust algorithm for multiple models fitting. It makes use of information coming both from the 3D structure and the images. Several results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.