I have asked the same question in stackoverflow ,http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17794772/steps-for-successful-image-recognition/17840975?noredirect=1#17840975, but since I am not getting considerable responses , I'm going to ask it again here . In order to do successful image recognition what are the steps one has to follow ,for example denoising , use of LDA , PCA , then use of neural network . I am not looking for any algorithm , just a brief outline of each of the steps from capturing an image to test an input image for similarity.