Abstract: Reliefs are sculptures that are carved on a surface of bump ups and downs. In recent years, they have received a lot of attention. It is hoped that the three-dimensional reliefs will be presented on the screen, so that we could easily edit them and carry out its re-creation. Before the analysis of reliefs, an important task is to extract the details from the background surface. This can be seen as a segmentation problem. However, current algorithms have some restrictions on the input and output results, for example, the output relief are connected with no holes, or it needs some careful interactions. In this paper, we provide a more accurate method for estimating the background surface, called base surface. With the iterative means, we can then extract the relief details automatically. Various experiments show that our method can obtain good extraction results for base region dominated reliefs.