1. A system for multi-layered object detection, the system comprising one or more processors configured to perform operations of: partitioning a field-of-view of an image captured by a sensor into a plurality of layers; operating a plurality of software agents as a cooperative swarm to sequentially search each of the plurality of layers to locate an objective function optima according to particle swarm optimization dynamics, wherein the objective function corresponds to a location of an object of interest in each layer being searched; extracting an object of interest from at least one layer for presentation to a user; and, wherein the system is further configured to perform operations of: searching a first layer for the objective function optima corresponding to the location of an object of interest, the first layer being the layer closest to the sensor; masking a region of the image upon detection of an object of interest in the first layer resulting in at least one masked region and at least one unmasked region, wherein the at least one masked region corresponds to a region in the field-of-view of the image behind the object of interest; and searching succeeding layers of the field-of-view for an object of interest until the entire field-of-view has been searched for at least one object of interest, wherein the plurality of software agents are distributed in at least one unmasked region of the field-of-view.