Unsupervised learning using deep neural networks, e.g. Google made a face detector using only unlabelled images that trained itself[1]. Seems like a similar approach could be applied to image segmentation, i.e. this problem.
DeepLearning4j author here. I'd just like to add that despite training neural networks being hard, they are great for understanding data if trained right.
There are a lot of innovations in image processing wrt neural nets specifically. The right neural network can learn everything from scene detection to simple object recognition.
I would highly reccommend taking a look at the neural nets course on coursera to understand some of the use cases.
You could probably do some neat things with Google glass. Feed the computer the images the human pays attention to all day, and let the computer extrapolate objects by how a persons' vision tracks them.
[1] http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co...