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I am quite interested to learn more about object recognition as well, unfortunately I don't have any direct answers to your question.

May I suggest your search for "Content Based Image Retrieval" for research papers in that field.

Yes, I've done a bit of searching on CBIR actually. There are a few papers out there about querying at multiple resolutions (like http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/query/mrquery.pdf), which will definitely be helpful.

The next step, for me, is to use a single image as the set to be queried, without knowing at what scale the target objects appear in the image.