Detecting A Specific Object (not class of objects)

Hi all, I'm familiar with some of the state of the art methods for detecting classes of objects in an image (ie, Cars, humans, CIFAR-classes, etc...).

However, if I am going to try to recognize a specific object in an image instead of a class of objects, it seems like a much simpler problem. Suppose I have an object in my room and I want my system to recognize this object when it is in an image (preferably with some invariance to rotation/lighting conditions), are there any algorithms that can take relatively few input examples of my object and then learn to recognize it in images? Unless I'm remembering wrong, I thought I had seen algorithms that could do this before...

Any help pointing me in the right direction would be appreciated. Thanks!