Objects within two-dimensional (2D) video data are modeled by three-dimensional (3D) models as a function of object type and motion through manually calibrating a 2D image to the three spatial dimensions of a 3D modeling cube. Calibrated 3D locations of an object in motion in the 2D image field of view of a video data input are computed and used to determine a heading direction of the object as a function of the camera calibration and determined movement between the computed 3D locations. The 2D object image is replaced in the video data input with an object-type 3D polygonal model having a projected bounding box that best matches a bounding box of an image blob, the model oriented in the determined heading direction. The bounding box of the replacing model is then scaled to fit the object image blob bounding box, and rendered with extracted image features.