The intricate motion arising from fluid-boundary interactions is visually compelling, yet notoriously difficult and computationally expensive to simulate in the presence of complex boundaries. Accurately resolving boundary geometry requires body-fitted grids constructed via cut-cell methods, which often leads to poorly conditioned linear systems in the pressure projection stage and, consequently, prohibitive computational cost. We present FastVEM , an efficient boundary-conforming fluid simulation framework that enables high-fidelity flow-boundary interaction at substantially reduced cost. Computational efficiency is achieved through a coordinated, top-down design spanning numerical discretization, grid construction, and linear solvers. FastVEM adopts a Virtual Element Method (VEM) discretization to robustly enforce incompressibility and boundary conditions on irregular body-fitted grids, and employs a VEM polynomial-space Particle-in-Cell scheme for advection. Complementing this discretization, a convexity-preserving cut-cell strategy is introduced to construct simulation-friendly body-fitted grids. To accelerate pressure projection, we develop a Galerkin geometric multi-grid solver featuring a diffusion-free prolongation operator that prevents coarse-level matrix densification, along with a nested, boundary-aware grid hierarchy that ensures well-posed placement of coarse-level degrees of freedom. Compared to prior cut-cell-based fluid simulators, FastVEM speeds up the computationally dominant pressure projection stage by up to 100×, while robustly handling even more challenging boundary geometries.

We present DIQ-MPM, a novel monolithic two-way coupling framework for simulating interactions between solids modeled with the total Lagrangian formulation and Eulerian incompressible fluids using the Material Point Method (MPM). Our approach combines an implicit TLMPM formulation with a mixed velocity-pressure scheme to robustly simulate compressible solids undergoing large deformations, while eliminating numerical fractures. To enable strong fluid-solid coupling without relying on overlapping grids, we introduce a Dual Interface Quadrature (DIQ) mechanism that maps fluid-solid interface information consistently between the current and reference configurations. This allows us to construct a unified sparse pressure-only system via Schur complement, leading to efficient and stable coupling. We also integrate a particle-based contact force model to resolve solid-solid and solid-boundary contacts within implicit TLMPM. Experimental results demonstrate that our method stably captures free-slip coupling, large deformation phenomena, and complex interactions between compressible solids and incompressible fluids.

We propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm that combines several novel techniques to achieve more stable and robust control results for coupled solid-fluid systems. Our method utilizes the twin-delayed actor-critic algorithm to efficiently utilize off-policy data and achieve faster convergence. For more accurate estimations of the value function to guide the search of optimal policies, we use the Boltzmann softmax operator to reduce the bias of estimation. We further introduce a novel two-step Q-value estimator to reduce the well-known under-estimation issue. Finally, to mitigate the requirement of excessive exploration under sparse rewards, we propose the Fluid Effective Domain Guidance (FEDG) algorithm to guide policy exploration, where the policy for an easier task is trained jointly with that for a harder task. Put together, our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in complex fluid-solid coupling control benchmarks, delivering stable and reliable performance in both 2D and 3D tasks over long horizons.

Existing Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) methods suffer from the existence of reflective objects, often resulting in blurry or distorted rendering. Instead of calculating a single radiance field, we propose a multi-space neural radiance field (MS-NeRF) that represents the scene using a group of feature fields in parallel sub-spaces, which leads to a better understanding of the neural network toward the existence of reflective and refractive objects. Our multi-space scheme works as an enhancement to existing NeRF methods, with only small computational overheads needed for training and inferring the extra-space outputs. We design different multi-space modules for representative MLP-based and grid-based NeRF methods, which improve Mip-NeRF 360 by 4.15 dB in PSNR with 0.5% extra parameters and further improve TensoRF by 2.71 dB with 0.046% extra parameters on reflective regions without degrading the rendering quality on other regions. We further construct a novel dataset consisting of 33 synthetic scenes and 7 real captured scenes with complex reflection and refraction, where we design complex camera paths to fully benchmark the robustness of NeRF-based methods. Extensive experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms the existing single-space NeRF methods for rendering high-quality scenes concerned with complex light paths through mirror-like objects.

The emergence of neural and Gaussian-based radiance field methods has led to considerable advancements in novel view synthesis and 3D object reconstruction. Nonetheless, specular reflection and refraction continue to pose significant challenges due to the instability and incorrect overfitting of radiance fields to high-frequency light variations. Currently, even 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS), as a powerful and efficient tool, falls short in recovering transparent objects with nearby contents due to the existence of apparent secondary ray effects. To address this issue, we propose TransparentGS, a fast inverse rendering pipeline for transparent objects based on 3D-GS. The main contributions are three-fold. Firstly, an efficient representation of transparent objects, transparent Gaussian primitives, is designed to enable specular refraction through a deferred refraction strategy. Secondly, we leverage Gaussian light field probes (GaussProbe) to encode both ambient light and nearby contents in a unified framework. Thirdly, a depth-based iterative probes query (IterQuery) algorithm is proposed to reduce the parallax errors in our probe-based framework. Experiments demonstrate the speed and accuracy of our approach in recovering transparent objects from complex environments, as well as several applications in computer graphics and vision.

The freezing of thin films is a mesmerizing natural phenomenon, inspiring photographers to capture its beauty through their lenses and digital artists to recreate its allure using effects tools. In this paper, we present a novel method for physically simulating the intricate freezing dynamics on thin films. By accounting for the influence of phase and temperature changes on surface tension, our method reproduces Marangoni freezing and the "Snow-Globe Effect", characterized by swirling ice dendrites on the film. We introduce a novel Phase Map method on top of the state-of-the-art Moving Eulerian-Lagrangian Particles (MELP) meshless framework, enabling dendritic crystal simulation on mobile particles and offering precise control over freezing patterns. We demonstrate that our method is able to capture a wide range of dynamic freezing processes of soap bubbles and is stable for complex boundaries in our experiments.

Fluid flows in spherical coordinates have raised the interest of the graphics community in recent years. The majority of existing works focus on 2D manifold flows on a spherical shell, and there are still many unresolved problems for 3D simulations in spherical coordinates, such as boundary conditions for arbitrary obstacles and flexible artistic controls. In this article, we propose a practical spherical-coordinate simulator for flow motions in 3D domains. Based on a layer-by-layer structure and a boundary-aware pressure solving scheme, we are able to recover horizontal and vertical flow motions in the presence of arbitrary terrain shapes within a spherical shell of finite thickness. Our proposed method straightforwardly builds on the conventions of previous 2D-manifold spherical-coordinate simulations and provides flexible artistic control strategies for art design.

Volumetric rendering-based methods, like NeRF, excel in HDR view synthesis from RAW images, especially for nighttime scenes. They suffer from long training times and cannot perform real-time rendering due to dense sampling requirements. The advent of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables real-time rendering and faster training. However, implementing RAW image-based view synthesis directly using 3DGS is challenging due to its inherent drawbacks: 1) in nighttime scenes, extremely low SNR leads to poor structure-from-motion (SfM) estimation in dis- tant views; 2) the limited representation capacity of the spherical harmonics (SH) function is unsuitable for RAW linear color space; and 3) inaccurate scene structure hampers downstream tasks such as refocusing. To address these issues, we propose LE3D (Lighting Every darkness with 3DGS). Our method proposes Cone Scatter Initialization to enrich the estimation of SfM and replaces SH with a Color MLP to represent the RAW linear color space. Additionally, we introduce depth distortion and near-far regularizations to improve the accuracy of scene structure for down- stream tasks. These designs enable LE3D to perform real-time novel view synthesis, HDR rendering, refocusing, and tone-mapping changes. Compared to previous vol- umetric rendering-based methods, LE3D reduces training time to 1% and improves rendering speed by up to 4,000 times for 2K resolution images in terms of FPS. Code and viewer can be found in https://srameo.github.io/projects/le3d.

The Bonded Discrete Element Method (BDEM) has raised interests in the graphics community in recent years because of its good performance in fracture simulations. However, current explicit BDEM usually needs to work under very small time steps to avoid numerical instability. We propose a new BDEM, namely Rod-BDEM (RBDEM), which uses Cosserat energy and yields integrable forces and torques. We further derive a novel Cosserat rod discretization method to effectively represent the three-dimensional topological connections between discrete elements. Then, a complete implicit BDEM system integrating the appropriate fracture model and contact model is constructed using the implicit Euler integration scheme. Our method allows high Young’s modulus and larger time steps in elastic deformation, breaking, cracking, and impacting, achieving up to 8 times speed up of the total simulation.

Physics-based fluid simulation has played an increasingly important role in the computer graphics community. Recent methods in this area have greatly improved the generation of complex visual effects and its computational efficiency. Novel techniques have emerged to deal with complex boundaries, multiphase fluids, gas–liquid interfaces, and fine details. The parallel use of machine learning, image processing, and fluid control technologies has brought many interesting and novel research perspectives. In this survey, we provide an introduction to theoretical concepts underpinning physics-based fluid simulation and their practical implementation, with the aim for it to serve as a guide for both newcomers and seasoned researchers to explore the field of physics-based fluid simulation, with a focus on developments in the last decade. Driven by the distribution of recent publications in the field, we structure our survey to cover physical background; discretization approaches; computational methods that address scalability; fluid interactions with other materials and interfaces; and methods for expressive aspects of surface detail and control. From a practical perspective, we give an overview of existing implementations available for the above methods.

Learning from multi-view images using neural implicit signed distance functions shows impressive performance on 3D Reconstruction of opaque objects. However, existing methods struggle to reconstruct accurate geometry when applied to translucent objects due to the non-negligible bias in their rendering function. To address the inaccuracies in the existing model, we have reparameterized the density function of the neural radiance field by incorporating an estimated constant extinction coefficient. This modification forms the basis of our innovative framework, which is geared towards highfidelity surface reconstruction and the novel-view synthesis of translucent objects. Our framework contains two stages. In the reconstruction stage, we introduce a novel weight function to achieve accurate surface geometry reconstruction. Following the recovery of geometry, the second phase involves learning the distinct scattering properties of the participating media to enhance rendering. A comprehensive dataset, comprising both synthetic and real translucent objects, has been built for conducting extensive experiments. Experiments reveal that our method outperforms existing approaches in terms of reconstruction and novel-view synthesis.

Caustics are challenging light transport effects for photo-realistic rendering. Photon mapping techniques play a fundamental role in rendering caustics. However, photon mapping methods render single caustics under the stationary light source in a fixed scene view. They require significant storage and computing resources to produce high-quality results. In this paper, we propose efficiently rendering more diverse caustics of a scene with the camera and the light source moving. We present a novel learning-based volume rendering approach with implicit representations for our proposed task. Considering the variety of materials and textures of planar caustic receivers, we decompose the output appearance into two components: the diffuse and specular parts with a probabilistic module. Unlike NeRF, we construct weights for rendering each component from the implicit signed distance function (SDF). Moreover, we introduce the centering calibration and the sine activation function to improve the performance of the color prediction network. Extensive experiments on the synthetic and real-world datasets illustrate that our method achieves much better performance than baselines in the quantitative and qualitative comparison, for rendering caustics in novel views with the dynamic light source. Especially, our method outperforms the baseline on the temporal consistency across frames.

Neural implicit methods have achieved high-quality 3D object surfaces under slight specular highlights. However, high specular reflections (HSR) often appear in front of target objects when we capture them through glasses. The complex ambiguity in these scenes violates the multi-view consistency, then makes it challenging for recent methods to reconstruct target objects correctly. To remedy this issue, we present a novel surface reconstruction framework, NeuS-HSR, based on implicit neural rendering. In NeuSHSR, the object surface is parameterized as an implicit signed distance function (SDF). To reduce the interference of HSR, we propose decomposing the rendered image into two appearances: the target object and the auxiliary plane. We design a novel auxiliary plane module by combining physical assumptions and neural networks to generate the auxiliary plane appearance. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that NeuS-HSR outperforms state-of-the-art approaches for accurate and robust target surface reconstruction against HSR. Code is available at https://github.com/JiaxiongQ/NeuS-HSR.

Existing Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) methods suffer from the existence of reflective objects, often resulting in blurry or distorted rendering. Instead of calculating a single radiance field, we propose a multi-space neural radiance field (MS-NeRF) that represents the scene using a group of feature fields in parallel sub-spaces, which leads to a better understanding of the neural network toward the existence of reflective and refractive objects. Our multi-space scheme works as an enhancement to existing NeRF methods, with only small computational overheads needed for training and inferring the extra-space outputs. We demonstrate the superiority and compatibility of our approach using three representative NeRF-based models, i.e., NeRF, Mip-NeRF, and Mip-NeRF 360. Comparisons are performed on a novelly constructed dataset consisting of 25 synthetic scenes and 7 real captured scenes with complex reflection and refraction, all having 360-degree viewpoints. Extensive experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms the existing single-space NeRF methods for rendering high-quality scenes concerned with complex light paths through mirror-like objects. Our code and dataset will be publicly available at https://zx-yin.github.io/msnerf.

Transparent objects are commonly seen in indoor scenes but are hard to estimate. Currently, commercial depth cameras face difficulties in estimating the depth of transparent objects due to the light reflection and refraction on their surface. As a result, they tend to make a noisy and incorrect depth value for transparent objects. These incorrect depth data make the traditional RGB-D SLAM method fails in reconstructing the scenes that contain transparent objects. An exact depth value of the transparent object is required to restore in advance and it is essential that the depth value of the transparent object must keep consistent in different views, or the reconstruction result will be distorted. Previous depth prediction methods of transparent objects can restore these missing depth values but none of them can provide a good result in reconstruction due to the inconsistency prediction. In this work, we propose a real-time reconstruction method using a novel stereo-based depth prediction network to keep the consistency of depth prediction in a sequence of images. Because there is no video dataset about transparent objects currently to train our model, we construct a synthetic RGB-D video dataset with different transparent objects. Moreover, to test generalization capability, we capture video from real scenes using the RealSense D435i RGB-D camera. We compare the metrics on our dataset and SLAM reconstruction results in both synthetic scenes and real scenes with the previous methods. Experiments show our significant improvement in accuracy on depth prediction and scene reconstruction.

Recently, 3D reconstruction methods based on the neural radiance fields have demonstrated remarkable generative performance. However, these methods frequently tend to be resource hungry and are challenging to regulate large low-textured regions in typical indoor scenes. In this work, we analyze and integrate inherent semantic geometry cues for self-supervised 3D reconstruction training via a unified framework of volume rendering and signed distance implicit representations. In contrast to previous neural implicit methods, we simultaneously incorporate the pixel-aligned features and image patches for multi-view consistency, thereby enabling us to depict a large indoor scene from challenging scenarios with rich visual details and large smooth backgrounds. Extensive experiments and comparisons demonstrate that our proposed method has achieved state-of-the-art results by a large margin in various tasks (e.g. actual surface reconstruction, novel view synthesis, and learning a universal scheme in occlusion or distorted regions).

Differentiable physics simulation has shown its efficacy in inverse design problems. Given the pervasiveness of the diverse interactions between fluids and solids in life, a differentiable simulator for the inverse design of the motion of rigid objects in two-way fluid-rigid coupling is also demanded. There are two main challenges to develop a differentiable two-way fluid-solid coupling simulator for rigid body control tasks: the ubiquitous, discontinuous contacts in fluid-solid interactions, and the high computational cost of gradient formulation due to the large number of degrees of freedom (DoF) of fluid dynamics. In this work, we propose a novel differentiable SPH-based two-way fluid-rigid coupling simulator to address these challenges. Our purpose is to provide a differentiable simulator for SPH which incorporates a unified representation for both fluids and solids using particles. However, naively differentiating the forward simulation of the particle system encounters gradient explosion issues. We investigate the instability in differentiating the SPH-based fluid-rigid coupling simulator and present a feasible gradient computation scheme to address its differentiability. In addition, we also propose an efficient method to compute the gradient of fluid-rigid coupling without incurring the high computational cost of differentiating the entire high-DoF fluid system. We show the efficacy, scalability, and extensibility of our method in various challenging rigid body control tasks with diverse fluid-rigid interactions and multi-rigid contacts, achieving up to an order of magnitude speedup in optimization compared to baseline methods in experiments.

We propose a learning-based controller for high-dimensional dynamic systems with coupled fluid and solid objects. The dynamic behaviors of such systems can vary across different simulators and the control tasks subject to changing requirements from users. Our controller features high versatility and can adapt to changing dynamic behaviors and multiple tasks without re-training, which is achieved by combining two training strategies. We use meta-reinforcement learning to inform the controller of changing simulation parameters. We further design a novel task representation, which allows the controller to adapt to continually changing tasks via hindsight experience replay. We highlight the robustness and generality of our controller on a row of dynamic-rich tasks, including scooping up solid balls from a water pool, in-air ball acrobatics using fluid spouts, and zero-shot transferring to unseen simulators and constitutive models. In all the scenarios, our controller consistently outperforms the plain multi-task reinforcement-learning baseline.

Multiple fluid simulation has raised wide research interest in recent years. Despite the impressive successes of current works, simulation of scenes containing mixing or unmixing of high-density-ratio phases using particle-based discretizations still remains a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a peridynamic mixture-model theory that stably handles high-density-ratio multi-fluid simulations. With assistance of novel scalar-valued volume flow states, a particle based discretization scheme is proposed to calculate all the terms in the multi-phase Navier-Stokes equations in an integral form, We also design a novel mass updating strategy for enhancing phase mass conservation and reducing particle volume variations under high density ratio settings in multi-fluid simulations. As a result, we achieve significantly stabler simulations in mixture-model multi-fluid simulations involving mixing and unmixing of high density ratio phases. Various experiments and comparisons demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Recent progress on salient object detection (SOD) mainly benefits from multi-scale learning, where the high-level and low-level features collaborate in locating salient objects and discovering fine details, respectively. However, most efforts are devoted to low-level feature learning by fusing multi-scale features or enhancing boundary representations. High-level features, which although have long proven effective for many other tasks, yet have been barely studied for SOD. In this paper, we tap into this gap and show that enhancing high-level features is essential for SOD as well. To this end, we introduce an Extremely-Downsampled Network (EDN), which employs an extreme downsampling technique to effectively learn a global view of the whole image, leading to accurate salient object localization. To accomplish better multi-level feature fusion, we construct the Scale-Correlated Pyramid Convolution (SCPC) to build an elegant decoder for recovering object details from the above extreme downsampling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EDN achieves state-of-the-art performance with real-time speed. Our efficient EDN-Lite also achieves competitive performance with a speed of 316fps. Hence, this work is expected to spark some new thinking in SOD. Code is available at https://github.com/yuhuan-wu/EDN.

To maintain incompressibility in SPH fluid simulations is important for visual plausibility. However, it remains an outstanding challenge to enforce incompressibility in such recent multiple-fluid simulators as the mixture-model SPH framework. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel incompressible SPH solver, where the compressibility of fluid is directly measured by the deformation gradient. By disconnecting the incompressibility of fluid from the conditions of constant density and divergence-free velocity, the new incompressible SPH solver is applicable to both single- and multiple-fluid simulations. The proposed algorithm can be readily integrated into existing incompressible SPH frameworks developed for single-fluid, and is fully parallelizable on GPU. Applied to multiple-fluid simulations, the new incompressible SPH scheme significantly improves the visual effects of the mixture-model simulation, and it also allows exploitation for artistic controlling.

Recently RGB-D sensors have become very popular in the area of Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM). The RGB-D SLAM approach relies heavily on the accuracy of the input depth map. However, refraction and reflection of transparent objects will result in false depth input of RGB-D cameras, which makes the traditional RGB-D SLAM algorithm unable to work correctly in the presence of transparent objects. In this paper, we propose a novel SLAM approach called transfusion that allows transparent object existence and recovery in the video input. Our method is composed of two parts. Transparent Objects Cut Iterative Closest Points (TC-ICP)is first used to recover camera pose, detecting and removing transparent objects from input to reduce the trajectory errors. Then Transparent Objects Reconstruction (TO-Reconstruction) is used to reconstruct the transparent objects and opaque objects separately. The opaque objects are reconstructed with the traditional method, and the transparent objects are reconstructed with the visual hull-based method. To evaluate our algorithm, we construct a new RGB-D SLAM database containing 25 video sequences. Each sequence has at least one transparent object. Experiments show that our approach can work adequately in scenes contain transparent objects while the existing approach can not handle them. Our approach significantly improves the accuracy of the camera trajectory and the quality of environment reconstruction.

Porous materials are common in daily life. They include granular material (e.g. sand) that behaves like liquid flow when mixed with fluid and foam material (e.g. sponge) that deforms like solid when interacting with liquid. The underlying physics is further complicated when multiple fluids interact with porous materials involving coupling between rigid and fluid bodies, which may follow different physics models such as the Darcy's law and the multiple-fluid Navier-Stokes equations. We propose a unified particle framework for the simulation of multiple-fluid flows and porous materials. A novel virtual phase concept is introduced to avoid explicit particle state tracking and runtime particle deletion/insertion. Our unified model is flexible and stable to cope with multiple fluid interacting with porous materials, and it can ensure consistent mass and momentum transport over the whole simulation space.

Extracting road graphs from aerial images automatically is more efficient and costs less than from field acquisition. This can be done by a post-processing step that vectorizes road segmentation predicted by CNN, but imperfect predictions will result in road graphs with low connectivity. On the other hand, iterative next move exploration could construct road graphs with better road connectivity, but often focuses on local information and does not provide precise alignment with the real road. To enhance the road connectivity while maintaining the precise alignment between the graph and real road, we propose a point-based iterative graph exploration scheme with segmentation-cues guidance and flexible steps. In our approach, we represent the location of the next move as a 'point' that unifies the representation of multiple constraints such as the direction and step size in each moving step. Information cues such as road segmentation and road junctions are jointly detected and utilized to guide the next move and achieve better alignment of roads. We demonstrate that our proposed method has a considerable improvement over state-of-the-art road graph extraction methods in terms of F-measure and road connectivity metrics on common datasets.

While it is trivial for humans to quickly assess the perceptual similarity between two images, the underlying mechanism are thought to be quite complex. Despite this, the most widely adopted perceptual metrics today, such as SSIM and FSIM, are simple, shallow functions, and fail to consider many factors of human perception. Recently, the facial modeling community has observed that the inclusion of both structure and texture has a significant positive benefit for face sketch synthesis (FSS). But how perceptual are these so-called “perceptual features”? Which elements are critical for their success? In this paper, we design a perceptual metric, called Structure Co-Occurrence Texture (Scoot), which simultaneously considers the block-level spatial structure and co-occurrence texture statistics. To test the quality of metrics, we propose three novel meta-measures based on various reliable properties. Extensive experiments verify that our Scoot metric exceeds the performance of prior work. Besides, we built the first largest scale (152k judgments) human-perception-based sketch database that can evaluate how well a metric consistent with human perception. Our results suggest that “spatial structure” and “co-occurrence texture” are two generally applicable perceptual features in face sketch synthesis.

In this paper, we reconsider the clustering problem for image over-segmentation from a new perspective. We propose a novel search algorithm named “active search” which explicitly considers neighboring continuity. Based on this search method, we design a back-and-forth traversal strategy and a "joint" assignment and update step to speed up the algorithm. Compared to earlier works, such as Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SLIC) and its follow-ups, who use fixed search regions and perform the assignment and the update step separately, our novel scheme reduces the iteration number before convergence, as well as improves boundary sensitivity of the over-segmentation results. Extensive evaluations on the Berkeley segmentation benchmark verify that our method outperforms competing methods under various evaluation metrics. In particular, lowest time cost is reported among existing methods (approximately 30 fps for a 481321 image on a single CPU core). To facilitate the development of over-segmentation, the code will be publicly available.

Modern visual odometry algorithms utilize sparse point-based features for tracking due to their low computational cost. Current state-of-the-art methods are split between indirect methods that process features extracted from the image, and indirect methods that deal directly on pixel intensities. In recent years, line-based features have been used in SLAM and have shown an increase in performance albeit with an increase in computational cost. In this paper, we propose an extension to a point-based direct monocular visual odometry method. Here we that uses lines to guide keypoint selection rather than acting as features. Points on a line are treated as stronger keypoints than those in other parts of the image, steering point-selection away from less distinctive points and thereby increasing efficiency. By combining intensity and geometry information from a set of points on a line, accuracy may also be increased.

The existing binary foreground map (FM) measures address various types of errors in either pixel-wise or structural ways. These measures consider pixel-level match or image-level information independently, while cognitive vision studies have shown that human vision is highly sensitive to both global information and local details in scenes. In this paper, we take a detailed look at current binary FM evaluation measures and propose a novel and effective E-measure (Enhanced-alignment measure). Our measure combines local pixel values with the image-level mean value in one term, jointly capturing image-level statistics and local pixel matching information. We demonstrate the superiority of our measure over the available measures on 4 popular datasets via 5 meta-measures, including ranking models for applications, demoting generic, random Gaussian noise maps, ground-truth switch, as well as human judgments. We find large improvements in almost all the meta-measures. For instance, in terms of application ranking, we observe improvement ranging from 9.08% to 19.65% compared with other popular measures.

Abstract Real world dendritic growths show charming structures by their exquisite balance between the symmetry and randomness in the crystal formation. Other than the variety in the natural crystals, richer visual appearance of crystals can benefit from artificially controlling of the crystal growth on its growing directions and shapes. In this paper, by introducing one extra dimension of freedom, i.e. the orientation field, into the simulation, we propose an efficient algorithm for dendritic crystal simulation that is able to reproduce arbitrary symmetry patterns with different levels of asymmetry breaking effect on general grids or meshes, including spreading on curved surfaces and growth in 3D. Flexible artistic control is also enabled in a unified manner by exploiting and guiding the orientation field in the visual simulation. We show the effectiveness of our approach by various demonstrations of simulation results.

In this paper, we reconsider the clustering problem for image over-segmentation from a new perspective. We propose a novel search algorithm called “active search” which explicitly considers neighbor continuity. Based on this search method, we design a back-and-forth traversal strategy and a joint assignment and update step to speed up the algorithm. Compared to earlier methods, such as simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC) and its variants, which use fixed search regions and perform the assignment and the update steps separately, our novel scheme reduces the number of iterations required for convergence, and also provides better boundaries in the over-segmentation results. Extensive evaluation using the Berkeley segmentation benchmark verifies that our method outperforms competing methods under various evaluation metrics. In particular, our method is fastest, achieving approximately 30 fps for a 481 × 321 image on a single CPU core. To facilitate further research, our code is made publicly available.

We present a learning-based method to control a coupled 2D system involving both fluid and rigid bodies. Our approach is used to modify the fluid/rigid simulator's behavior by applying control forces only at the simulation domain boundaries. The rest of the domain, corresponding to the interior, is governed by the Navier-Stokes equation for fluids and Newton-Euler's equation for the rigid bodies. We represent our controller using a general neural-net, which is trained using deep reinforcement learning. Our formulation decomposes a control task into two stages: a precomputation training stage and an online generation stage. We utilize various fluid properties, e.g., the liquid's velocity field or the smoke's density field, to enhance the controller's performance. We set up our evaluation benchmark by letting controller drive fluid jets move on the domain boundary and allowing them to shoot fluids towards a rigid body to accomplish a set of challenging 2D tasks such as keeping a rigid body balanced, playing a two-player ping-pong game, and driving a rigid body to sequentially hit specified points on the wall. In practice, our approach can generate physically plausible animations.

Surface flow phenomena, such as rain water flowing down a tree trunk and progressive water front in a shower room, are common in real life. However, compared with the 3D spatial fluid flow, these surface flow problems have been much less studied in the graphics community. To tackle this research gap, we present an efficient, robust and high-fidelity simulation approach based on the shallow-water equations. Specifically, the standard shallow-water flow model is extended to general triangle meshes with a feature-based bottom friction model, and a series of coherent mathematical formulations are derived to represent the full range of physical effects that are important for real-world surface flow phenomena. In addition, by achieving compatibility with existing 3D fluid simulators and by supporting physically realistic interactions with multiple fluids and solid surfaces, the new model is flexible and readily extensible for coupled phenomena. A wide range of simulation examples are presented to demonstrate the performance of the new approach.

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.

Multiple-fluid interaction is an interesting and common visual phenomenon we often observe. In this paper, we present an energy-based Lagrangian method that expands the capability of existing multiple-fluid methods to handle various phenomena, such as extraction, partial dissolution, etc. Based on our user-adjusted Helmholtz free energy functions, the simulated fluid evolves from high-energy states to low-energy states, allowing flexible capture of various mixing and unmixing processes. We also extend the original Cahn-Hilliard equation to be better able to simulate complex fluid-fluid interaction and rich visual phenomena such as motion-related mixing and position based pattern. Our approach is easily integrated with existing state-of-the-art smooth particle hydrodynamic (SPH) solvers and can be further implemented on top of the position based dynamics (PBD) method, improving the stability and incompressibility of the fluid during Lagrangian simulation under large time steps. Performance analysis shows that our method is at least 4 times faster than the state-of-the-art multiple-fluid method. Examples are provided to demonstrate the new capability and effectiveness of our approach.

This article presents a versatile and robust SPH simulation approach for multiple-fluid flows. The spatial distribution of different phases or components is modeled using the volume fraction representation, the dynamics of multiple-fluid flows is captured by using an improved mixture model, and a stable and accurate SPH formulation is rigorously derived to resolve the complex transport and transformation processes encountered in multiple-fluid flows. The new approach can capture a wide range of real-world multiple-fluid phenomena, including mixing/unmixing of miscible and immiscible fluids, diffusion effect and chemical reaction, etc. Moreover, the new multiple-fluid SPH scheme can be readily integrated into existing state-of-the-art SPH simulators, and the multiple-fluid simulation is easy to set up. Various examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Fluid flows are highly nonlinear and nonstationary, with turbulence occurring and developing at different length and time scales. In real-life observations, the multiscale flow generates different visual impacts depending on the distance to the viewer. We propose a new fluid simulation framework that adaptively allocates computational resources according to the viewer's position. First, a 3D empirical mode decomposition scheme is developed to obtain the velocity spectrum of the turbulent flow. Then, depending on the distance to the viewer, the fluid domain is divided into a sequence of nested simulation partitions. Finally, the multiscale fluid motions revealed in the velocity spectrum are distributed nonuniformly to these view-dependent partitions, and the mixed velocity fields defined on different partitions are solved separately using different grid sizes and time steps. The fluid flow is solved at different spatial-temporal resolutions, such that higher frequency motions closer to the viewer are solved at higher resolutions and vice versa. The new simulator better utilizes the computing power, producing visually plausible results with realistic fine-scale details in a more efficient way. It is particularly suitable for large scenes with the viewer inside the fluid domain. Also, as high-frequency fluid motions are distinguished from low-frequency motions in the simulation, the numerical dissipation is effectively reduced.

The nonlinear and nonstationary nature of Navier-Stokes equations produces fluid flows that can be noticeably different in appearance with subtle changes. In this paper, we introduce a method that can analyze the intrinsic multiscale features of flow fields from a decomposition point of view, by using the Hilbert-Huang transform method on 3D fluid simulation. We show how this method can provide insights to flow styles and help modulate the fluid simulation with its internal physical information. We provide easy-to-implement algorithms that can be integrated with standard grid-based fluid simulation methods and demonstrate how this approach can modulate the flow field and guide the simulation with different flow styles. The modulation is straightforward and relates directly to the flow's visual effect, with moderate computational overhead.

We present an interactive algorithm for hair rendering and appearance editing under complex environment lighting represented as spherical radial basis functions (SRBFs). Our main contribution is to derive a compact 1D circular Gaussian representation that can accurately model the hair scattering function introduced by [Marschner et al. 2003]. The primary benefit of this representation is that it enables us to evaluate, at run-time, closed-form integrals of the scattering function with each SRBF light, resulting in efficient computation of both single and multiple scatterings. In contrast to previous work, our algorithm computes the rendering integrals entirely on the fly and does not depend on expensive pre-computation. Thus we allow the user to dynamically change the hair scattering parameters, which can vary spatially. Analyses show that our 1D circular Gaussian representation is both accurate and concise. In addition, our algorithm incorporates the eccentricity of the hair. We implement our algorithm on the GPU, achieving interactive hair rendering and simultaneous appearance editing under complex environment maps for the first time.