1. An apparatus for calibrating a three dimensional mesh model of an articulated object which is an instance of a specified object class comprising: an input configured to receive captured sensor data depicting the object; a calibration engine configured to compute values of shape parameters of the three dimensional mesh model which indicate which member of the object class is depicted in the captured sensor data, in order to calibrate the three dimensional mesh model; the calibration engine configured to compute the values of the shape parameters with an optimization process to find at least one potential local or global minimum of an energy function, the energy function expressing a degree of similarity between data rendered from the model and the received sensor data.