1. In a vision system for identifying touching parts, a method for identifying an object independent of the orientation of said object, comprising the steps of (a) developing sensory data comprising an image of said object; (b) separating closed regions from background by connectivity analysis of the data representing said image; (c) developing a chain encoded representation of a region boundary of each of said closed regions of said image; (d) fitting edge segments to the chain encoded representation of each region boundary to produce a more succinct representation of the boundary of each of said closed regions of said image; (e) fitting straight line and circular arc segments to the edge segments to create edges and corners which characterize said image; (f) classifying said straight line and circular arc segments by feature classes, each said feature class describing a group of related features with a specific range of lengths, radii, included angles and/or angular ranges, one or more of said feature classes being associated with each of a plurality of prototypes stored in memory of said vision system to facilitate matching said image with one or more of said plurality of prototypes; (g) proposing a match of an image of said object to said prototype based on said feature present in said object being classified in feature classes associated with said prototype; and (h) verifying the match of the object and the prototype by translation and rotation of a region boundary of the prototype to align with the image of the object to match features of said image with features of said prototype whereby the object can be identified even when overlying another part.