1. A method for automatically determining a discretization step length of an object model transformation comprising a set of model points, the method comprising the steps of: (a) providing a digital electronic image of the object with a camera; (b) providing an initial value for the discretization step length based on the size of the object; (c) identifying a minimum similarity measure that is associated with the current discretization step; (d) halving the discretization step length until the associated minimum similarity measure exceeds a certain threshold to determine a resultant discretization step; and (e) using the resultant discretization step length to generate model transformations for object recognition.