A system and method for identifying objects using a machine-vision based system are disclosed. Briefly described, one embodiment is a method that captures a first image of at least one object with an image capture device, processes the first captured image to find an object region based on a reference two-dimensional model and determines a three-dimensional pose estimation based on a reference three-dimensional model that corresponds to the reference two-dimensional model and a runtime three-dimensional representation of the object region where a point-to-point relationship between the reference three-dimensional models of the object and the runtime three-dimensional representation of the object region is not necessarily previously known. Thus, two-dimensional information or data is used to segment an image and three-dimensional information or data used to perform three-dimensional pose estimation on a segment of the image.