This paper presents an approach to object detection which is based on recent work in statistical models for texture synthesis and recognition. Our method follows the texture recognition work of De Bonet and Viola (1998). We use feature vectors which capture the joint occurrence of local features at multiple resolutions. The distribution of feature vectors for a set of training images of an object class is estimated by clustering the data and then forming a mixture of Gaussian models. The mixture model is further refined by determining which clusters are the most discriminative for the class and retaining only those clusters. After the model is learned, test images are classified by computing the likelihood of their feature vectors with respect to the model. We present promising results in applying our technique to face detection and car detection.