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Efficient kd-tree construction for ray tracing using ray distribution sampling

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Abstract

Although regarded as a standard heuristic for constructing a kd-tree, Surface Area Heuristic (SAH) suffers from degrading traversal performance as well as unnecessary acceleration structure construction due to its assumption of uniform ray distribution. In this paper, first, we propose a Grid based Ray Distribution Heuristic (GRDH) to construct a high quality kd-tree. The information of ray distribution is sampled and recorded in a sparse grid, which is also utilized to partition primitives efficiently. The heuristic only evaluating traversal cost on limited splitting candidates, is fast and easy to be implemented. Then, we introduce a novel ray tracing pipeline with two-pass construction and two-pass tracing routine to enable an on-demand construction algorithm. In the pipeline, after constructing a partially structured kd-tree, rays are classified by whether triggering transitions to construct unstructured leaf nodes, and being traced in different tracing passes. For on-demand construction, this raises the barrier of interleaving with traversal routine, as well as enables the algorithm to be flexible on multi-core computation platform. Additionally, GRDH is also combined into on-demand construction for high traversal performance. The experimental results demonstrate that the on-demand GRDH construction algorithm can achieve a speedup of 1.63 ~ 1.95 in overall frame performance for scenes with more than 360K primitives.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers. The research is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China with grant No. 61472261, National Key Technology R&D Program of China with grant No. 2012BAH62F03, Youth Foundation of Southwest Petroleum University with grant No. 0202002131285, Talent Project of Science and Technology Innovation of Sichuan Province with grant No. 14-YCG052, Science Project of Education Department of Sichuan Province with grant No. 020402000091.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China

    Xiao Liang, Hongyu Yang, Yanci Zhang & Jun Yin

  2. School of Computer Science, Southwest Petroleum University, Chengdu, China

    Xiao Liang

  3. School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China

    Yue Cao

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  1. Xiao Liang
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  2. Hongyu Yang
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  3. Yanci Zhang
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  4. Jun Yin
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Correspondence to Yanci Zhang.

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Liang, X., Yang, H., Zhang, Y. et al. Efficient kd-tree construction for ray tracing using ray distribution sampling. Multimed Tools Appl 75, 15881–15899 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-015-2896-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-015-2896-7

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