An image processing system for recognizing the scene type of an input image generates an image distance metric from a set of images. The image processing system further extracts image features from the input image and each image in the set of images. Based on the distance metric and the extracted image features, the image processing system computes image feature distances for selecting a subset of images. The image processing system derives a scene type from the scene type of the subset of images. In one embodiment, the image processing system is a cloud computing system.