This paper discusses the performance of soft computing techniques based on support vector machine (SVM) for image classification, particularly focusing on the Gaussian elastic metric kernel. It compares the effectiveness of various kernel functions, emphasizing that the SVM with the Gaussian elastic metric kernel outperforms others in classification accuracy, especially with time series data. The study highlights the advantages of the 1-norm SVM in handling indefinite kernels and its ability to retain sparsity in the support vector set.