Is there an OBJECT BASED Image Segmentation method, with pure non-segmented training images?
This is not a complete answer (I would comment directly your question but not allowed to due to rep), but you could look at "Learning and detecting shape models v1.3 (September 2009)" (http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/calvin/software.html). The paper's name is: "From images to shape models for object detection" by Ferrari, Jurie &amp; Schmid

The idea is to learn a contour based model of object which is then possible to deform. Actually, you have to segment a little bit by providing simply bounding boxes (x-y coordinates of the top-left and bottom-right corner) of the object in the training images. You may also use training images that are already cropped around the object which you want to learn the model.

I tried their Matlab implementation and creating the bounding boxes for my training images was about as fast as manually cropping them in Gimp or else...

EDIT: BTW, if you wonder how to create groundtruth files with this program, I used a text editor such as "Notepad++" to create a text file. In the file, I wrote, separated by spaces, the coordinates of the bounding box, e.g.:" 10 33 572 458 " (no quote) then saved the file with an appropriate name (check how they do for their sample files) with the dummy extension ".groundtruth", their Matlab implementation will recognize the files.