1. A method of operating an image recognition system comprising the steps of: segmenting a video image into two or more regions based on variations in intensity in said video image; screening the characteristics of each of said regions by comparing curvature and orientation attributes of selected local features of regions with reference features stored in an attribute memory and identifying one or more sets of reference features from said attribute memory which closely resemble a set of selected local features of each region; retrieving one or more reference images for each regions from an image memory using addresses from the screening and identifying step; for each of the reference images, computing a horizontal and a vertical offset by matching each of said selected local features with each of said reference features; and using the offsets computed in the previous step, aligning and matching the intensity of each of said regions against the intensity of each of the retrieved reference images for that region to determine one reference image which most closely matches that region.