1. A method for automatically recognizing objects in digital image data, comprising: detecting an object of interest in input digital image data; obtaining a normalized object of interest; assigning texton representations of the normalized object of interest to produce a first a texton array; determining a similarity between the texton representations and previously determined texton representations of at least one other object; detecting and normalizing a plurality of reference objects from a plurality of images; obtaining a first plurality of filter responses based upon pixels forming the plurality of normalized reference objects; forming a first plurality of vectors based upon the first plurality of filter responses; and clustering the first plurality of vectors into a plurality of groups, wherein each group is assigned a texton label.