The Minimal Bounding Volume Hierarchy

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Date
2010
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association
Abstract
Bounding volume hierarchies (BVH) are a commonly used method for speeding up ray tracing. Even though the memory footprint of a BVH is relatively low compared to other acceleration data structures, they still can consume a large amount of memory for complex scenes and exceed the memory bounds of the host system. This can lead to a tremendous performance decrease on the order of several magnitudes. In this paper we present a novel scheme for construction and storage of BVHs that can reduce the memory consumption to less than 1% of a standard BVH. We show that our representation, which uses only 2 bits per node, is the smallest possible representation on a per node basis that does not produce empty space deadlocks. Our data structure, called the Minimal Bounding Volume Hierarchy (MVH) reduces the memory requirements in two important ways: using implicit indexing and preset surface reduction factors. Obviously, this scheme has a non-negligible computational overhead, but this overhead can be compensated to a large degree by shooting larger ray bundles instead of single rays, using a simpler intersection scheme and a two-level representation of the hierarchy. These measure enable interactive ray tracing performance without the necessity to rely on out-of-core techniques that would be inevitable for a standard BVH.
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@inproceedings{
:10.2312/PE/VMV/VMV10/227-234
, booktitle = {
Vision, Modeling, and Visualization (2010)
}, editor = {
Reinhard Koch and Andreas Kolb and Christof Rezk-Salama
}, title = {{
The Minimal Bounding Volume Hierarchy
}}, author = {
Bauszat, Pablo
and
Eisemann, Martin
and
Magnor, Marcus
}, year = {
2010
}, publisher = {
The Eurographics Association
}, ISBN = {
978-3-905673-79-1
}, DOI = {
/10.2312/PE/VMV/VMV10/227-234
} }
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