Perception and manipulation of rigid objects has received a lot of attention, and several solutions have been proposed. In contrast, dealing with deformable objects is a relatively new and challenging task because they are more complex to model, their state is difficult to determine, and self-occlusions are common and hard to estimate. In this paper we present our progress/results in the perception of deformable objects both using conventional RGB cameras and active sensing strategies by means of depth cameras.We provide insights in two different areas of application: grasping of textiles and plant leaf modelling.