KNVI/KIVI Thesis Awards for Computing and Information Science
Nov 29, 2021

Our MSc student Zhaiyu Chen recently received the first prize (€3,000) in the prestigious KNVI/KIVI Thesis Awards for Computing and Information Science.

His thesis “Learning to Reconstruct Compact Building Models from Point Clouds” aims at obtaining simplified surface models of real-world buildings - models with significantly small numbers of polygonal faces yet can still sufficiently describe the geometry of a building. His thesis proposes a novel framework based on deep learning for reconstructing simplified 3D building models from point clouds, which finds significant applications in the digitalization of the urban environment. This is the first learning-based framework for the 3D reconstruction of urban buildings from point clouds. Though this thesis focuses on urban buildings, the proposed method can already be directly applied to general objects with polygonal shapes. Thus, the research output contributes to not only the field of geoinformation but also computer vision and graphics at large.

Zhaiyu recently started as a researcher at the chair of 3D Geoinformation, Department of Urbanism. He will start his PhD position at TU Munich (Germany) from February 2022.

Congratulations to Zhaiyu!