From content moderation to wildlife conservation, the number of applications that require models to recognize nuanced or subjective visual concepts is growing. Traditionally, developing classifiers for such concepts requires substantial manual effort measured in hours, days, or even months to identify and annotate data needed for training. Even with recently proposed Agile Modeling techniques, which enable rapid bootstrapping of image classifiers, users are still required to spend 30 minutes or more of monotonous, repetitive data labeling just to train a single classifier. Drawing on Fiske's Cognitive Miser theory, we propose a new framework that alleviates manual effort by replacing human labeling with natural language interactions, reducing the total effort required to define a concept by an order of magnitude: from labeling 2,000 images to only 100 plus some natural language interactions. Our framework leverages recent advances in foundation models, both large language models and vision-language models, to carve out the concept space through conversation and by automatically labeling training data points. Most importantly, our framework eliminates the need for crowd-sourced annotations. Moreover, our framework ultimately produces lightweight classification models that are deploy-able in cost-sensitive scenarios. Across 15 subjective concepts and across 2 public image classification datasets, our trained models outperform traditional Agile Modeling as well as state-of-the-art zero-shot classification models like ALIGN, CLIP, CuPL, and large visual question answering models like PaLI-X.

The application of computer vision methods to nuanced, subjective concepts is growing. While crowdsourcing has served the vision community well for most objective tasks (such as labeling a "zebra"), it now falters on tasks where there is substantial subjectivity in the concept (such as identifying "gourmet tuna"). However, empowering any user to develop a classifier for their concept is technically difficult: users are neither machine learning experts nor have the patience to label thousands of examples. In reaction, we introduce the problem of Agile Modeling: the process of turning any subjective visual concept into a computer vision model through real-time user-in-the-loop interactions. We instantiate an Agile Modeling prototype for image classification and show through a user study (N=14) that users can create classifiers with minimal effort in under 30 minutes. We compare this user driven process with the traditional crowdsourcing paradigm and find that the crowd’s notion often differs from that of the user’s, especially as the concepts become more subjective. Finally, we scale our experiments with simulations of users training classifiers for ImageNet21k categories to further demonstrate the efficacy of the approach.

We present a method for simultaneously recovering shape and spatially varying reflectance of a surface from photometric stereo images. The distinguishing feature of our approach is its generality; it does not rely on a specific parametric reflectance model and is therefore purely ldquodata-drivenrdquo. This is achieved by employing novel bi-variate approximations of isotropic reflectance functions. By combining this new approximation with recent developments in photometric stereo, we are able to simultaneously estimate an independent surface normal at each point, a global set of non-parametric ldquobasis materialrdquo BRDFs, and per-point material weights. Our experimental results validate the approach and demonstrate the utility of bi-variate reflectance functions for general non-parametric appearance capture.

It is well known in the photometric stereo literature that uncalibrated photometric stereo, where light source strength and direction are unknown, can recover the surface geometry of a Lambertian object up to a 3-parameter linear transform known as the generalized bas relief (GBR) ambiguity. Many techniques have been proposed for resolving the GBR ambiguity, typically by exploiting prior knowledge of the light sources, the object geometry, or non-Lambertian effects such as specularities. A less celebrated consequence of the GBR transformation is that the albedo at each surface point is transformed along with the geometry. Thus, it should be possible to resolve the GBR ambiguity by exploiting priors on the albedo distribution. To the best of our knowledge, the only time the albedo distribution has been used to resolve the GBR is in the case of uniform albedo. We propose a new prior on the albedo distribution : that the entropy of the distribution should be low. This prior is justified by the fact that many objects in the real-world are composed of a small finite set of albedo values.

We consider the problem of reconstructing the shape of a surface with an arbitrary, spatially varying isotropic bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF), and introduce a novel, stratified photometric stereo method. By using a particular configuration of lights, it is possible to use symmetry in the image measurements resulting from BRDF isotropy to estimate at each point a plane containing the surface normal. For differentiable surfaces, this allows us to recover the isocontours of the depth map, but not the actual depth associated with each contour. The isocontour structure provides topological information about the surface (critical points, Reeb graph, etc.). By using additional cues in the image data or imposing additional constraints on the surface (e.g., shadows, specular highlights, Helmholtz reciprocity, uniform BRDF), the unknown height of each isocontour can be estimated and the metric structure is resolved. We validate this technique on real and synthetic data by successfully recovering the isocontours of the depth map from images.

We develop a novel technique for measuring lighting that exploits the interaction of light with a set of custom BRDFs. This enables the construction of a planar light probe with certain advantages over existing methods for measuring lighting. To facilitate the construction of our light probe, we derive a new class of bi-directional reflectance functions based on the interaction of light through two planar surfaces separated by a transparent medium. Under certain assumptions and proper selection of the two surfaces, we show how to recover Fourier series coefficients of the incident lighting parameterized over the plane. The results are experimentally validated by imaging a sheet of glass with spatially varying patterns printed on either side.