1. An image processing system for recognizing a scene within an image comprising: i. an image processing system; ii. software adapted to operate on the image processing system, the software adapted to generate a distance metric from a set of images, wherein the distance metric indicates a first set of image features and a set of image feature weights corresponding to the first set of image features; iii. the software further adapted to retrieve an input image; iv. the software further adapted to extract a set of input image features from the input image, wherein the set of input image features corresponds to the distance metric; v. the software further adapted to extract a second set of image features from each image in the set of images, wherein each of the extracted sets of image features corresponds to the distance metric; vi. based on the set of image feature weights of the distance metric, the software further adapted to compute an image feature distance between the set of input image features and each of the extracted sets of image features; vii. the software further adapted to select, from the set of images, a subset of images based on the computed image feature distances; viii. the software further adapted to determine a scene type from the scene types of the subset of images; and ix. the software further adapted to assign the determined scene type to the input image.