Form inspection of non-linear surfaces is a difficult task as suitable analytical models are often unavailable. This paper presents a mathematical model for surface inspection of face-milled plates and determination of the minimum zone based on a modification of the support vector machine (SVM) technique. The SVM approach is reformulated to regression problems using a different methodology than the ‘largest margin’ paradigm. In addition, this work derives extremely simple quadratic programming (QP) problems that allow for general symbolic solutions to non-linear regression problems. The results obtained from preliminary testing allow identification of processing tendencies so that a selective sampling procedure may be applied for inspecting future plates from that lot.