1. An article of manufacture comprising: a non-transitory machine-readable medium; and instructions carried by the medium and operable to cause a programmable processor to perform: obtaining images of objects and metadata associated with each image; automatically initializing a portion of the each image as at least one of a foreground portion and a background portion according to the metadata associated with the each image, and based on empirical observations for identifying a portion of an image based on models; segmenting the each image into the foreground portion and the background portion, the segmenting including: building an initial segmentation model, initializing pixels matching the foreground portion and the background portion, and repeating pixel allocation until classification of foreground and background pixels converges; determining at least one foreground portion depicting an object of the desired characteristics; and providing an image corresponding to the at least one foreground portion.