Object recognition and scene classification are among the main interests in computer vision which have been investigated for long. Automatic recognition and classification ofobjects and scenes is an important skill to be gained by computers, especially in the field of artificial intelligence. Merging this skill with the ever increasing computing power of the computers will help in the development ofmany applications that are yet to be resolved. In this article, we present a survey on contextual and semantic approaches for object recognition by reviewing both computer vision and human vision literatures. ©2008 IEEE