Perceptual Evaluation of Liquid Simulation Methods

ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2017), Vol. 36 (4), Article No. 143

Authors
Kiwon Um, Technical University of Munich
Xiangyu Hu, Technical University of Munich
Nils Thuerey, Technical University of Munich

Abstract
This paper proposes a novel framework to evaluate fluid simulation methods based on crowd-sourced user studies in order to robustly gather large numbers of opinions. The key idea for a robust and reliable evaluation is to use a reference video from a carefully selected real-world setup in the user study. By conducting a series of controlled user studies and comparing their evaluation results, we observe various factors that affect the perceptual evaluation. Our data show that the availability of a reference video makes the evaluation consistent. We introduce this approach for computing scores of simulation methods as visual accuracy metric. As an application of the proposed framework, a variety of popular simulation methods are evaluated.

Keywords
perceptual evaluation, liquid simulation, fluid-implicit-particle (FLIP), smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), crowd-sourcing

Links
ACM DL, Preprint
Video (YouTube), Appendix (YouTube)
Code
Talk

This work is supported by the ERC Starting Grant 637014.