1. A method for recognizing a known object in a field of view of a machine vision system, comprising: capturing a bitmap image file of the field of view employing the machine vision system; executing a first feature extraction of the bitmap image file to generate appearance features including a color histogram and an edge direction histogram, wherein the color histogram includes the bitmap image file quantized for hue and color saturation, and wherein the edge direction histogram includes the bitmap image file quantized for frequency and directionality of brightness changes of an object captured in the bitmap image file; identifying a reduced search space based upon the appearance features, including comparing the color histogram and the edge direction histogram with features of partial views of the known objects, wherein the reduced search space includes a portion of data contained in the bitmap image file; executing a second feature extraction of the bitmap image file to identify geometric features including a viewpoint feature histogram and an ensemble of shape functions associated with the bitmap image file, wherein the viewpoint feature histogram is determined by encoding statistics of a shape of an input point cloud associated with the bitmap image file by accumulating geometric relations between all point pairs; fusing the appearance features and the geometric features with the reduced search space; wherein said fusing includes comparing the fused appearance features, geometric features and the reduced search space with a plurality of predetermined partial views of a plurality of known objects; and recognizing, by the controller, one of the known objects based upon the comparing.