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Reconstruction of freeform surfaces from scattered coordinate data is a difficult problem encountered in many surface fitting and geometric modeling applications. Conventional tessellation and parametric surface fitting techniques are limited because they require prior knowledge about the connectivity between the sampled points. The method of surface reconstruction described in this paper exploits the learning capability of a self-organizing feature map (SOFM) to adaptively fit a deformable sphere to the unorganized 3D coordinate data. The learning algorithm automatically establishes the connectivity between the measured points by iteratively changing the topological relationships within the map. By incorporating additional constraints during the learning process it is possible to have the deformable map follow the shape of objects with surface holes and cavities. Several examples of freeform surfaces with varying levels of complexity are discussed in order to demonstrate the performance of the algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]