The State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Beihang University in Beijing, has proposed an image based mod-eling method for inhomogeneous single-scattering participating media whose density fields may contain high frequency details.
3D modeling and codec of real objects are hot issues in the field of virtual reality. In this paper, we propose an automatic registration two range images method and a cycle based automatic global registration algorithm for rapidly and automatically registering all range images and constructing a realistic 3D model. Besides, to meet the requirement of huge data transmission over Internet, we present a 3D mesh encoding/decoding method for encoding geometry, topology and attribute data with high compression ratio and supporting progressive transmission. The research results have already been applied successfully in digital museum.