[CS] Jacob Serfaty MS Presentation - Nov 14, 2025

[Jessica Garza via cs]

Jacob Serfaty is a student in the Bx/MS in CS Program.

===============================================

Candidate: Jacob Serfaty

Date: Friday, November 14, 2025

Time:  1:30 pm CT

Location: JCL 390

Title: VizCross: Using 2D Visual Priors for Feature Algined Cross Field Design

Abstract: We present VizCross: a technique for constructing cross fields on meshes guided by visual features in images. Our method leverages the strong priors of text-to-image generative models to produce multi-view images of our mesh that contain feature-aligned signal. We extract this signal as explicit per-pixel directions in the 2D images which we then back project to the mesh surface. We aggregate these candidate surface directions across multiple views by solving a sparse linear system, using the surface directions as soft constraints alongside a smoothness energy. Key to our method, we propose a custom constraint weighing that prioritizes candidates according to normal alignment and consistency across views. This weighted solve allows us to resolve conflicts on faces between candidates from different views and smoothly interpolate our field to faces not seen in the 2D images. Our method is fast, robust, and can be used with any 2D visual signal. While we focus on generative priors for 2D visual guidance, we also show applications to real-time, interactive cross field design using coarse, artist-drawn lines as signal. We demonstrate the effectiveness of VizCross on a myriad of meshes, reporting comparable quality to state-of-the-art optimization and data-driven techniques, while offering improved control over feature alignment.

Advisors: Rana Hanocka

Committee Members: Rana Hanocka, Pedro Lopes, and Gordon Kindlmann

Jessica Garza
Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of Computer Science
The University of Chicago
John Crerar Library 374
Office: (773) 702-2336
Schedule Advising Appointment <https://calendar.app.google/FCKmPBfoCsWKdDqy7>



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.cs.uchicago.edu/pipermail/cs/attachments/20251113/563e8652/attachment.html>