A mechanism is provided in a data processing system for detecting lithographic hotspots. The mechanism receives a design layout. The mechanism generates spatial pattern clips from the design layout. The mechanism performs a transform on the spatial pattern clips to form frequency domain pattern clips. The mechanism performs feature extraction on the frequency domain pattern clips to form frequency domain features. The mechanism utilizes the extracted features on a set of training samples to train a machine learning classifier model. The mechanism classifies a set of previously unseen patterns, based on frequency domain features of the previously unseen patterns using the trained machine learning classifier model, into hotspots and non-hotspots.