A method and system of transitivity matching suitable for object recognition, and in particular biometric recognition such as face or fingerprint recognition, is provided. The invention provides a means for pre-encoding object match information from each set of raw object sample data or scores from an underlying recognition algorithm. A sample space is constructed and the raw scores are mapped into that space. Preferably, a recognition space is also constructed and the sample space scores are further mapped into the recognition space. Each space may be truncated to remove dispensable modes of that space. The distance between object data samples encoded in the sample space or the recognition space can be more rapidly determined, and the encoded data samples are also significantly compressed, compared to the raw scores.