The aim of this lecture is to present a strategy for the problem of discrete plane recognition based on multidimensional continued fractions and S-adic systems. The problem of the discrete plane recognition consists in deciding whether a given set of points with integer coordinates can be described as a plane discretization. The role played respectively by words, substitutions, and classical continued fractions will be played here respectively by stepped surfaces, generalized substitutions and Brun's algorithm. We thus give a geometric interpretation of Brun's continued fraction algorithm in terms of the so-called generalized substitutions introduced by Arnoux and Ito.