Calibration of 3-D optical sensors often involves the use of calibration artifacts consisting of geometric features, such as 2 or more planes or spheres of known separation. In order to reduce data processing time and minimize user input during calibration, the respective features of the calibration artifact need to be automatically detected and labeled from the measured point clouds. The Hough transform (HT), which is a well-known method for line detection based on foot-of-normal parameterization, has been extended to plane detection in 3-D space. However, the typically sparse intermediate 3-D Hough accumulator space leads to excessive memory storage requirements. A 3-D HT method based on voting in an optimized sparse 3-D matrix model and efficient peak detection in Hough space is described. An alternative 1-D HT is also investigated for rapid detection of nominally parallel planes. Examples of the performance of these methods using simulated and experimental shape data are presented. C 2011 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).