Object recognition techniques are disclosed that provide both accuracy and speed. One embodiment of the present invention is an identification system. The system is capable of locating objects in images by searching for local features of an object. The system can operate in real-time. The system is trained from a set of images of an object or objects. The system computes interest points in the training images, and then extracts local image features (tokens) around these interest points. The set of tokens from the training images is then used to build a hierarchical model structure. During identification/detection, the system, computes interest points from incoming target images. The system matches tokens around these interest points with the tokens in the hierarchical model. Each successfully matched image token votes for an object hypothesis at a certain scale, location, and orientation in the target image. Object hypotheses that receive insufficient votes are rejected.