Instant Ray Tracing: The Bounding Interval Hierarchy

Wächter, Carsten; Keller, Alexander

Instant Ray Tracing: The Bounding Interval Hierarchy

Files

139-149.pdf (380.2 KB)

Date

2006

Authors

Wächter, Carsten
Keller, Alexander

Publisher

The Eurographics Association

Abstract

We introduce a new ray tracing algorithm that exploits the best of previous methods: Similar to bounding volume hierarchies the memory of the acceleration data structure is linear in the number of objects to be ray traced and can be predicted prior to construction, while the traversal of the hierarchy is as efficient as the one of kd-trees. The construction algorithm can be considered a variant of quicksort and for the first time is based on a global space partitioning heuristic, which is much cheaper to evaluate than the classic surface area heuristic. Compared to spatial partitioning schemes only a fraction of the memory is used and a higher numerical precision is intrinsic. The new method is simple to implement and its high performance is demonstrated by extensive measurements including massive as well as dynamic scenes, where we focus on the total time to image including the construction cost rather than on only frames per second.

        @inproceedings{:10.2312/EGWR/EGSR06/139-149
,
booktitle = {Symposium on Rendering
},
editor = {Tomas Akenine-Moeller and Wolfgang Heidrich
},
title = {{Instant Ray Tracing: The Bounding Interval Hierarchy
}},
author = {Wächter, Carsten and 
Keller, Alexander
},
year = {2006
},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association
},
ISSN = {1727-3463
},
ISBN = {3-905673-35-5
},
DOI = {/10.2312/EGWR/EGSR06/139-149
}
}