1. A system for detecting objects in an image captured by an imaging device, the system comprising: a spatially variant filter that spatially filters the image, the spatially variant filter having a filter size range based on a distance range of distances to the image from the imaging device and objects to be detected in the image, wherein the spatially variant filter varies the filter size based on a position in the image of a portion of the image being processed; a feature extractor that extracts features from the image using the spatially filtered image; and an object discriminator that detects objects in the image using the extracted features.