Bounding Volume Hierarchies for Interactive Ray Tracing

Bounding volume hierarchies (BVHs) are one of the most efficient data structures for organizing complex 3D scenes. BVHs have a number of applications in various fields of computer science ranging from computer graphics and games to robotics. In particular, BVHs can be used to efficiently execute collision detection and proximity queries by concentrating the computation on parts of the scene that potentially fulfill the query.

In my talk, I will briefly survey the usage of BVHs for ray tracing acceleration. I will present a technique optimizing BVHs using insertion based global optimization procedure that leads to very efficient hierarchies. I will also discuss a modification of this technique for the incremental construction of BVH for real-time ray tracing of complex models streamed over a network. I will further present a method allowing to construct a single BVH optimized for all frames of a given animation sequence. Finally, I will conclude my talk by presenting new results in GPU based BVH construction for real-time ray tracing.

Bio

Jiří Bittner is an associate professor at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague. He received his Ph.D. in 2003 at the same institute. For several years he worked as a researcher at the Vienna University of Technology. His research interests include visibility computations, real-time rendering, spatial data structures, and global illumination. He participated in a number of national and international research projects and also several commercial projects dealing with real-time rendering of complex scenes.