The invention relates to a method for the optical detection of the position and orientation of an object by means of an optical device comprising at least one parallelogram fastened to said object, the optical device comprising optical means and electronic analysis means making it possible to determine the coordinates of the four vertices of the parallelogram A′B′C′D′, in an orthonormal frame with center 0, denoted R0 (O, {right arrow over (i)}, {right arrow over (j)}, {right arrow over (k)}). The principle of the device consists in determining the vertices of the parallelogram A′B′C′D′, on the basis of the knowledge of the characteristics of the parallelogram and of four known points of a quadrilateral ABCD. This quadrilateral represents the drawing arising from the projection of the parallelogram A′B′C′D′ in a known image plane. The characteristics A′B′C′D′ of the parallelogram can be for example its height, its width and the coordinate of one of its points in the frame R0.