So KinectFusion is an awesome new Microsoft algorithm for the GPU that essentially does real-time SLAM with Kinect RGBD cameras. They didn’t publish the source, but the WillowGarage PCL and OpenCV guys have been busy implementing it from the paper. And I must say, the beta versions so far in the PCL svn are quite impressive. It acts about the same as what you see in the Microsoft demo videos. If you like games check this crossword generator, it runs perfect On my GTX 470 it runs at 20 Hz. It does seem to loose track fairly easily and has to reset, especially with large camera movements. Plus because it is using a dense voxel representation on the GPU, the max size is 512x512x512, which covers only a small room with reasonable resolution. This isn’t great, but I imagine that issues such as these could be fixed with better global matching (for instance color ICP) or a paging system that seamlessly transfers parts of the voxel representation between the CPU and GPU so you can model larger areas. I spent all day Saturday playing around with friends on KinectFusion and trying to use GPU-accelerated SURF matching to enforce a better global localization, but without a lot of success. We also captured some cool 3D models to voxel files. During this process, we found a bug in their saving function. Binary files were being written without being opened as binary, which turned all ‘\n’ into ‘\r\n’ on Windows. Today I submitted a patch, which I guess makes me an open-source contributor to PCL. Woohoo!