1. A method of object detection and recognition comprising: (i) receiving an image for which it is required to carry out object detection and recognition; and (ii) generating a part label map for the received image, the part label map comprising, for each image element of the received image, a label indicating which of a plurality of parts that image element is assigned to, each part being a densely represented image area; wherein the step of generating the part label map comprises at least: accessing a pre-specified classifier arranged to estimate a belief distribution over parts for each image element of the received image; and using an inference algorithm to infer the part label map from a conditional random field by forcing a global part labeling which is substantially layout-consistent.