1. An automated image processing method comprising: extracting a plurality of patches of an input image; for each patch, extracting at least one high level feature based on its low level representation and a generative model built from low level features; for each patch, and for at least one object class from a set of object classes, computing a relevance score for the patch based on the at least one high level feature and the output of at least one patch classifier; for at least some of the pixels of the image, computing a relevance score for the at least one object class based on the patch scores; and assigning an object class label to each of the pixels based on the computed relevance score for the at least one object class.