Abstract We propose an approach to texture boundary detection that only requires a line-search in the direction normal to the edge. It is therefore very fast and can be incorporated into a real-time 3?D pose estimation algorithm that retains the speed of those that rely solely on gradient properties along object contours but does not fail in the presence of highly textured object and clutter. This is achieved by correctly integrating probabilities over the space of statistical texture models. We will show that this rigorous and formal statistical treatment results in good performance under demanding circumstances