09-18

Zeyu Ma FPO

Zeyu Ma will present his FPO "Procedural Generation of Unbounded 3D Scenes" on Friday, September 18, 2026 at 1:30 PM in CS 402.

The members of Zeyu’s committee are as follows:
Examiners: Jia Deng (Adviser), Felix Heide, Adam Finkelstein
Readers: Zhuang Liu, Qixing Huang (UT Austin)

A copy of his thesis is available upon request. Please email gradinfo@cs.princeton.edu if you would like a copy of the thesis.

Everyone is invited to attend the talk.

Abstract follows below:

Synthetic data, meaning images and labels generated by computers, is a promising alternative to collecting datasets in the real world and annotating them manually. Procedural generation, which creates content using algorithms, is an effective way to produce it: compact rules express complex, unbounded geometry; parameters give strong controllability; and unlimited varied instances can be generated automatically.

This thesis addresses the challenges that unbounded scenes pose for procedural generation. Such scenes are an essential part of diverse environments, yet existing methods cannot handle them efficiently. Producing images from a procedural scene means extracting a mesh from it, and no uniformly spaced mesh serves an unbounded scene: a spacing fine enough for the geometry near the camera is prohibitively dense in the distance, and one coarse enough for the distance is far too sparse up close.

Our contributions are in two parts. The first is an efficient procedural system for unbounded terrain, developed as part of Infinigen and published at CVPR 2023. It represents terrain with pseudo-signed distance functions, which keep only the sign of the true distance and thereby unify height maps, volumetric elements such as caves and rocks, and simulated tiles into one composable representation. The second is mesh extraction for a moving camera, a line of work that led to two papers. OcMesher, published at 3DV 2025,builds a camera-aware octree that is refined only where surfaces are visible and close to some camera, and produces a single static mesh valid for a whole set of camera poses. BinocMesher, published at SIGGRAPH Asia 2025, partitions4D spacetime with a binary-octree and slices the extracted 4D mesh at each timestamp, giving temporally smooth meshes along long camera trajectories. In all of them, detail is allocated against where the camera can see, and the allocation is a property of the coordinate system or data structure.