To achieve the updating of a 3D environment database, the human operator must be provided with methods for recovering the position-orientation of a known object. In this paper two different methods are presented: the first one is based on the edges and uses geometric transformations to retrieve the position-orientation of the object. The other technique is numerical and based on the vertices and constraints on these vertices. Then a comparison is made between the methods, which focuses on both the application fields and the results given by their respective algorithms. These 3D recovering methods allow to control a robot by pointing out the object to be manipulated onto the video screen.