Category context models (64) and a universal context model (62) are generated including sums of soft co-occurrences of pairs of visual words in geometric proximity to each other in training images (50) assigned to each category and assigned to all categories, respectively. Context information (76) about an image to be classified (70) are generated including sums of soft co-occurrences of pairs of visual words in geometric proximity to each other in the image to be classified. For each category (82), a comparison is made of (i) closeness of the context information about the image to be classified with the corresponding category context model and (ii) closeness of the context information about the image to be classified with the universal context model. An image category (92) is assigned to the image to be classified being based on the comparisons.