Visual perception for manipulation and imitation in humanoid robots This thesis deals with visual perception for manipulation and imitation in humanoid robots. In particular real time applicable methods for object recognition and pose estimation as well as for markerless human motion capture have been developed. As only sensor a small baseline stereo camera system (approx. human eye distance) was used. An extensive experimental evaluation has been performed on simulated as well as real image data from real world scenarios using the humanoid robot ARMAR III.