Methods and an apparatuses for automatically recognizing and/or verifying objects in a digital image are presented. In one example, a method automatically recognizes objects in digital image data by 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, and determining a similarity between the texton representations and previously determined texton representations of at least one other object. In another example, an apparatus for automatically recognizing objects in digital image data is presented, which includes an image processing control-operably coupled to memory and functional processing units for controlling recognition processing, where the functional processing units further include an object detection unit, a normalizing unit, a texton generation unit, and a similarity unit.