Congratulations to Youssef Korny, who successfully defended his M.Sc. thesis in Earth and Space Science at York University on June 11, 2026.
His thesis, “A Two-Stage Diffusion Framework for 3D Building Reconstruction from Single Nadir Images,” uses diffusion models to recover the 3D shape of buildings from a single image taken straight down from above. This kind of image is easy to collect at scale, but it shows very little of a building’s height and walls, which makes 3D reconstruction hard.
The thesis has been recommended for an M.Sc. Thesis Prize. We thank the examining committee, Prof. Michael Bazzocchi (Chair), Prof. Regina Lee and Prof. Shweta Mahajan (Internal Member), for their careful reading and thoughtful questions.
Youssef continues in the lab as a Ph.D. student, working on 3D urban modelling.
More photos are in the Gallery.