Inferring and recognizing 3D objects form a 2D occuluded image has been an important research area of computer vision. The octree model, a hierarchical volume description of 3D objects, may be utilized to generate projected images from arbitrary viewing directions, thereby providing an efficient means of the data base for 3D object recognition. We present a fast algorithm of finding the 4 pairs of feature points to estimate the viewing direction. The method is based on matching the object contour to the reference occuluded shapes of 49 viewing directions. The initially best matched viewing direction is calibrated by searching for the 4 pairs of feature points between the input image and the image projected along the estimated viewing direction. Then the input shape is recognized by matching to the projectd shape. The computational complexity of the proposed method is shown to be O(n$^{2}$) in the worst case, and that of the simple combinatorial method is O(m$^{4}$.n$^{4}$) where m and n denote the number of feature points of the 3D model object and the 2D object respectively.