Systems and methods for addressing the problem of specific planar object search from a large-scale image database. Given a query image with a particular object and a planar surface, the systems and methods attempt to find, from a large image corpus, a set of representative images in which that object appears. According to the complexity of geometric transformations between a query image and its target images, the whole problem can be categorized into two classes: Rotation-Scale-Translation (RST)-transformed image search, and affine/homography-transformed image search.