Described is a system for rapid directed area search utilizing particle swarm optimization. The system first extracts salient regions from an input image. The system then detects regions of interest from the salient regions utilizing particle swarm optimization, wherein a swarm of software agents, or particles, cooperate to locate an objective function optima, or region of interest, in an image. A set of local feature descriptors are then extracted from the image, wherein a local feature descriptor corresponds to a neighborhood surrounding a point of interest in a region of interest in the image. Additionally, the set of local feature descriptors are clustered hierarchically into a database so that a closest match between a new input image and a stored image can be determined. Finally, the matching regions of the two images are registered to align matching regions to allow detection of changes between the images.