A system for automatically detecting and recognizing the identity of a deformable object such as a human face, within an arbitrary image scene. The system comprises an object detector implemented as a probabilistic DBNN, for determining whether the object is within the arbitrary image scene and a feature localizer also implemented as a probabilistic DBNN, for determining the position of an identifying feature on the object such as the eyes. A feature extractor is coupled to the feature localizer and receives coordinates sent from the feature localizer which are indicative of the position of the identifying feature and also extracts from the coordinates information relating to other features of the object such as the eyebrows and nose, which are used to create a low resolution image of the object. A probabilistic DBNN based object recognizer for determining the identity of the object receives the low resolution image of the object inputted from the feature extractor to identify the object.