Advancing our knowledge of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) is of great importance for understanding the fundamental physical processes of the Heliosphere and the Sun-Earth environment. A large amount of image data from coronagraphs and heliospheric imagers has been produced in recent years to study the motion and evolution of CMEs from the Sun out to 1AU. This is crucial for learning to predict the extreme and dynamic conditions known as space weather. There are inherent difficulties in studying the exact mechanisms that govern CME eruption and propagation; most notably the limitation of 2D projected plane-of-sky observations that confuses the interpretation of these transient phenomena. However, a wealth of ongoing mission data continues to be tackled with increasingly advanced processing techniques, to better reveal the faint CME structure for study. In this talk I shall highlight some of the advances that have been made in the detection and characterisation of CMEs in observations from, e.g., SOHO/LASCO and STEREO/SECCHI. This includes new catalogues being developed, for example as part of the HELCATS FP7 initiative, as well as the combination of multi-viewpoint observations in an effort to study the true morphology of CMEs.