1. A computer readable media including one or more computer readable mediums having stored thereon one or more sequences of instructions for causing one or more microprocessors to perform the steps for recognition of patterns in a digital image, the steps comprising: creating a vector set comprising a plurality of image characteristic vectors, the vector set corresponding to an image characteristic; identifying a candidate region of an image, the candidate region comprising a plurality of candidate region vectors; determining a correlation for each candidate region vector in the plurality of candidate region vectors with each image characteristic vector in the vector set; and calculating the correlations to determine the probability that the candidate region exhibits the image characteristic.