A computationally efficient modeling system for imagery scales both the original image and corresponding principal component tiles in the same proportion to be able to extract scaled principal components. The system includes recovery of feature weights for the image model by extracting the weights from the reduced size principal component tiles. The use of the reduced size tiles to derive weights dramatically reduces computer overhead both in the generation of the files and in the generation of the weights, and is made possible by the fact that the weights from the scaled down tiles are nearly equal to the weights of the tiles associated with the full size image. The subject system thus reduces computation and the number of bits required to represent features by first scaling the image and then tiling the image in the same proportion. In one embodiment, the scaled down tiles are used as training exemplars used to generate the principal components.