An experimental comparative study of three matching methods for the recognition of 3D objects from a 2D view is carried out. The methods include graph matching, geometric hashing and the alignment technique. The same source of information is made available to each method to ensure that the comparison is meaningful. The experiments are designed to measure the performance of the methods in different imaging conditions. We show that matching by geometric hashing and alignment is very sensitive to clutter and measurement errors. Thus in realistic scenarios graph matching is superior to the other methods in terms of both recognition accuracy and computational complexity.