Abstract: A computer-readable medium for performing target object recognition in images and video includes instructions for receiving target image data including a target object, applying non-negative matrix factorization with enforced sparseness to the target image data to generate target extracted image feature data, training a neural network to identify the target object using the target extracted image feature data to obtain a trained neural network, receiving object image data, applying non-negative matrix factorization with enforced sparseness to the object image data to generate object extracted image feature data, analyzing the object extracted image feature data with the trained neural network to obtain a result indicating whether the presence of the target object is identified in the object image data, and storing the result of analyzing the object extracted image feature data.