Comparing Hierarchical Data Structures for Sparse Volume Rendering with
Empty Space Skipping
Abstract
Empty space skipping can be efficiently implemented with
hierarchical data structures such as k-d trees and bounding volume
hierarchies. This paper compares several recently published hierarchical
data structures with regard to construction and rendering performance.
The papers that form our prior work have primarily focused on
interactively building the data structures and only showed that
rendering performance is superior to using simple acceleration data
structures such as uniform grids with macro cells. In the area of
surface ray tracing, there exists a trade-off between construction and
rendering performance of hierarchical data structures. In this paper we
present performance comparisons for several empty space skipping data
structures in order to determine if such a trade-off also exists for
volume rendering with uniform data topologies.