A key problem in model-based object recognition is selection, namely, the problem of determining which regions in the image are likely to come from a single object. In this paper we present an approach that extracts and uses color region information to perform selection either based solely on image- data (data-driven), or based on the knowledge of the color description of the model (model -driven). The paper presents a method of perceptual color specification by color categories to extract perceptual color regions. It also discusses the utility of color-based selection in reducing the search involved in recognition.