Nice post. I'm a researcher in computer vision, so I'm glad to see that people find these problems interesting. It's often easy to underestimate how difficult vision problems are, since they seem so natural to us.

I think the recent posts by lyst (this color naming post, and the previous background subtraction post) are great introductions to problems in computer vision. However, there is a lot more sophisticated work out there, and the techniques used in these posts are decades old (and contain some errors).

If you liked this post, you should check out this more recent demo http://clothingparsing.com/

If you have a computer vision problem in mind, you can gauge the state-of-the-art, by searching recent papers on Google Scholar. Even if you're unfamiliar with the jargon, the introduction and conclusion of a paper can give you an intuition about the problem being solved and the steps the authors are proposing.

If you want to learn more about computer vision and its details, I highly recommend checking out online materials such as

http://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs143/

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs4670/2013fa/lectures/lec...

http://szeliski.org/Book/