And yet facial-recognition is now freely available to consumers (Picasa, Facebook etc), our phones have blink detection, 3D motion detection and tracking is available to consumers for ~$100 (Kinect).

I'm not familiar with the PASCAL object detection challenge, but I just had a quick look. It's hard - if I understand it correctly, classifiers had to categorize photos into containing 5 types of objects form the 1000 leaf nodes of http://www.image-net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2010/browse-synset.... (Based on the description from http://www.image-net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2010/pascal_ilsvrc...). I'm having trouble understanding the scoring scheme (how is flat cost calculated?), but based on this I'm quite impressed.

I'm human (yes, I swear it's true), and I couldn't classify things like different breeds of poodle: http://www.image-net.org/synset?wnid=n02113712