This paper presents a novel method for radius measurement of fillet regions of polygonal models by using optimum onhogonal planes. The objective function for finding an optimum onhogonal plane is designed based on the orthogonality between the normal vectors of the faces in a filet region and the plane that is to be found. Direct search methods are employed to solve the defined optimization problem since no explicit derivatives of the object function can be calculated. Once an optimum orthogonal plane is obtained, the intersection between the onhogonal plane and the faces of interest is calculated, and necessary point data in the fillet region for measuring radii are extracted by some manipulation. Then, the radius of the fillet region in question is measured by least squares fitting of a circle to the extracted point data. The proposed radius measuring method could eliminate the burden of defining a plane for radius measurement, and automatically find a necessary optimum orthogonal plane. It has an advantage in that it can measure fillet radii without prior complicated segmentation of fillet regions and explicit information of neighboring surfaces. The proposed method is demonstrated trough some mea-surement examples.