This paper introduces a simple new approach to object recognition from silhouettes. This new approach utilizes features extracted using an adaptive approximation technique called high-resolution pursuit (HRP). In this work, a comparatively small set of HRP features and a simple recognition scheme are used. We demonstrate the strengths of the HRP-based recognition scheme by discriminating among 17 military aircraft. The HRP-based algorithm matches the performance of a widely studied method based on Fourier descriptors in the presence of boundary, scale and orientation variations, and surpasses the performance of the Fourier descriptor-based algorithm in the presence of occlusion and localized silhouette variations.