1. A method of extracting universal scene descriptors (USDs) from a scene, comprising: providing a sequence of one or more unsegmented images of a scene; unsupervised decomposition of the scene captured in each said image into at least one region of interest (ROI), at least one said scene decomposed into a plurality of ROIs; extracting multiple classes of biologically-inspired hierarchical visual features from each scene for each of the one or more ROI; and assembling the visual features from the plurality of classes into a universal feature vector for each said ROI, each said feature vector providing a USD for the scene.