We actually met some people doing something like this in Cambridge when MagicSolver was just starting - a group called imense (http://www.imense.com/ http://www

We actually met some people doing something like this in Cambridge when MagicSolver was just starting - a group called imense (http://www.imense.com/ http://www.imense.com/). They have an automated picture tagger. You give it a picture of a field of sunflowers, for example, and it comes up with 'flowers, nature, field, ...'. I imagine that if you made it domain-specific (your PCB example), you might be able to actually classify the objects.