The Iterative Closest Point (ICP) scheme has been widely used for the registration of surfaces and point clouds. However, when working on depth image sequences where there are large geometric planes with small (or even without) details, existing ICP algorithms are prone to tangential drifting and erroneous rotational estimations due to input device errors. In this paper, we propose a novel ICP algorithm that aims to overcome such drawbacks, and provides significantly stabler registration estimation for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) tasks on RGB-D camera inputs. In our approach, the tangential drifting and the rotational estimation error are reduced by: 1) updating the conventional Euclidean distance term with the local geometry information, and 2) introducing a new camera stabilization term that prevents improper camera movement in the calculation. Our approach is simple, fast, effective, and is readily integratable with previous ICP algorithms. We test our new method with the TUM RGB-D SLAM dataset on state-of-the-art real-time 3D dense reconstruction platforms, i.e., ElasticFusion and Kintinuous. Experiments show that our new strategy outperforms all previous ones on various RGB-D data sequences under different combinations of registration systems and solutions.

Realistic animation of various interactions between multiple fluids, possibly undergoing phase change, is a challenging task in computer graphics. The visual scope of multi-phase multi-fluid phenomena covers complex tangled surface structures and rich color variations, which can greatly enhance visual effect in graphics applications. Describing such phenomena requires more complex models to handle challenges involving the calculation of interactions, dynamics and spatial distribution of multiple phases, which are often involved and hard to obtain real-time performance. Recently, a diverse set of algorithms have been introduced to implement the complex multi-fluid phenomena based on the governing physical laws and novel discretization methods to accelerate the overall computation while ensuring numerical stability. By sorting through the target phenomena of recent research in the broad subject of multiple fluids, this state-of-the-art report summarizes recent advances on multi-fluid simulation in computer graphics.

Abstract This article presents a novel and flexible bubble modelling technique for multi-fluid simulations using a volume fraction representation. By combining the volume fraction data obtained from a primary multi-fluid simulation with simple and efficient secondary bubble simulation, a range of real-world bubble phenomena are captured with a high degree of physical realism, including large bubble deformation, sub-cell bubble motion, bubble stacking over the liquid surface, bubble volume change, dissolving of bubbles, etc. Without any change in the primary multi-fluid simulator, our bubble modelling approach is applicable to any multi-fluid simulator based on the volume fraction representation.