Abstract: This paper describes an approach for detecting overlapped ellipses by combining region and edge data. The Principle Component Analysis method is used to give the shape and position of an ellipse. A region based EM iterative algorithm is proposed to calculate the number of ellipses and their initial shapes in the overlapped region. As a result, every edge point is assigned to a certain ellipse by statistics decision. Then an edge fitting algorithm is employed to define the ellipses' geometric parameters based on the edge data. Above coarse-to-fine algorithm is applied to detect the overlapped fruits and the moving targets. The result is stable and accurate.