In this paper, we propose the example-specific density based matching kernel (ESDMK) for classification of scene images represented as sets of local feature vectors. The proposed kernel is computed between the pair of examples, represented as sets of local feature vectors, by matching the estimates of example-specific densities computed at every local feature vector in those two examples. In this work, the number of local feature vectors of an example among the K nearest neighbors of a local feature vector is considered as an estimate of the example-specific density. The minimum of the two example-specific densities, one for each example, at a local feature vector is considered as the matching score. The ESDMK is then computed as the sum of the matching score computed at every local feature vector in a pair of examples. We also propose the spatial ESDMK (SESDMK) to include spatial information present in the scene images while matching the pair of scene images. Each of the scene images is divided spatially into a fixed number of regions. Then the SESDMK is computed as a combination of region specific ESDMKs that match the corresponding regions. We study the performance of the support vector machine (SVM) based classifiers using the proposed ESDMKs for scene classification and compare with that of the SVM-based classifiers using the state-of-the-art kernels for sets of local feature vectors. © 2015 IEEE.