1. A computerized system for automated retrieval of images from an unstructured repository, the computerized system comprising: an image locator that automatically locates images for analysis within the repository to populate a region of interest (ROI) database that contains searchable entries representing images stored in the repository; an ROI classifier that segments one or more images located by the image locator into a plurality of ROIs, each ROI containing image content associated with one or more actual features of a physical object in the ROI, the ROI classifier having at least one computer-implemented transform filter adapted to extract one or more physical descriptors from the image content for each ROI to be stored in the ROI database as a physical feature vector, each physical descriptor corresponding to at least one of the one or more actual features of a given physical object in the ROI associated with the image content; and an ROI query module adapted to search the ROI database for images containing content associated with at least one true physical object.