Estimating targets using statistical properties of observations of known targets

A method for estimating scenes from images generates a plurality of scenes and renders an image for each scene. The scenes and corresponding images are partitioned into patches. Each patch is quantitized as a vector and probability density function is fitted to each vector. The patches and probabilities are organized as a Markov network where local probability information is propagated to neighboring nodes. After propagation, the probability densities at each node is used to estimate the scene.