A system and a method for detecting a pile of material by an autonomous machine. A 3D point cloud method includes obtaining a 3D point cloud indicative of an environment having a material pile, performing a ground surface estimation on the point cloud to identify non-ground points, grouping the non-ground points into clusters based on a proximity metric, creating a normalized height histogram for each of the clusters, comparing the normalized height histogram of each cluster to a generalized pile histogram, and identifying a cluster as a pile based on the similarity between the normalized height histogram and the generalized pile histogram. A 2D image method includes obtaining a 2D image from an imaging device, calibrating the imaging device with respect to a coordinate frame of the machine, and autonomously detecting an image of a material pile in the two-dimensional image using a trained deep-learning neural network.