A method of computing global-to-local metrics for recognition. Based on training examples with feature representations, the method automatically computes a local metric that varies over the space of feature representations to optimize discrimination and the performance of recognition systems.Given a set of points in an arbitrary features space, local metrics are learned in a hierarchical manner that give low distances between points of same class and high distances between points of different classes. Rather than considering a global metric, a class-based metric or a point-based metric, the proposed invention applies successive clustering to the data and associates a metric to each one of the clusters.