Many problems in the fields of image processing and computer vision relate to creating good representations of information in images of objects in scenes. We provide a system for learning repeated-structure elements from one or more input images. The repeated-structure elements are patches that may be single pixels or coherent groups of pixels of varying shape, size and appearance (where those shapes and sizes are not pre-specified). Input images are mapped to a single output image using offset maps to specify the mapping. A joint probability distribution on the offset maps, output image and input images is specified and an unsupervised learning process is used to learn the offset maps and output image. The learnt output image comprises repeated-structure elements. This shape and appearance information captured in the learnt repeated-structure elements may be used for object recognition and many other tasks.