Title
Cost prediction for ray shooting in octrees
Abstract
The ray shooting problem arises in many different contexts and is a bottleneck of ray tracing in computer graphics. Unfortunately, theoretical solutions to the problem are not very practical, while practical methods offer few provable guarantees on performance.Attempting to combine practicality with theoretical soundness, we show how to provably measure the average performance of any ray-shooting method based on traversing a bounded-degree spatial decomposition, where the average is taken to mean the expectation over a uniform ray distribution. An approximation yields a simple, easy-to-compute cost predictor that estimates the average performance of ray shooting without running the actual algorithm.We experimentally show that this predictor provides an accurate estimate of the efficiency of executing ray-shooting queries in octree-induced decompositions, irrespective of whether or not the bounded-degree requirement is enforced, and of the criteria used to construct the octrees. We show similar guarantees for decompositions induced by kd-trees and uniform grids. We also confirm that the performance of an octree while ray tracing or running a radio-propagation simulation is accurately captured by our cost predictor, for ray distributions arising from realistic data.
Year
DOI
Venue
2006
10.1016/j.comgeo.2005.09.002
Comput. Geom.
Keywords
Field
DocType
cost predictor,ray shooting,k d-tree,octree,uniform grid,easy-to-compute cost predictor,cost prediction,average performance,ray shooting problem,cost model,uniform ray distribution,kd-tree,space decomposition,bounded-degree spatial decomposition,bounded-degree requirement,ray distribution,practical method,radio propagation,ray tracing,kd tree,k d tree,computer graphic
Bottleneck,Combinatorics,Computer science,Ray tracing (graphics),Cost prediction,k-d tree,Algorithm,Soundness,Computer graphics,Octree,Traverse
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
34
3
Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.38
19
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Boris Aronov11430149.20
Hervé Brönnimann286669.61
Allen Y. Chang3336.34
Yi-jen Chiang450338.21