Systems and methods for modeling the occurrence of common image components (e.g., sub-regions) in order to improve visual object recognition are disclosed. In one example, a query image may be matched to a training image of an object. A matched region within the training image to which the query image matches may be determined and a determination may be made whether the matched region is located within an annotated image component of the training image. When the matched region matches only to the image component, an annotation associated with the component may be identified. In another example, sub-regions within a plurality of training image corpora may be annotated as common image components including associated information (e.g., metadata). Matching sub-regions appearing in many training images of objects may be down-weighted in the matching process to reduce possible false matches to query images including common image components.