The goal of lifelong visual learning is to develop techniques that continuously and autonomously learn from visual data, potentially for years or decades. During this time the system should build an ever-improving base of generic visual information, and use it as background knowledge and context for solving specific computer vision tasks. In my talk, I will highlight two recent results from our group on the road towards lifelong visual scene understanding: the derivation of theoretical guarantees for lifelong learning systems and the development of practical methods for object categorization based on semantic attributes.