The left and middle images show results of ray tracing using our random-accessible compressed bounding
volume hierarchies (RACBVHs) of St. Matthew model consisting of 128 M triangles and an iso-surface model
consisting of 102 M triangles. The right image shows a frame during a rigid-body simulation using collision detection
between two models including the Lucy model consisting of 28 M triangles. By using RACBVHs, we can reduce the
storage requirement by a factor of 10:1 and, more importantly, improve the performance of ray tracing and collision
detection by more than a factor of four over using uncompressed data.
Abstract
We present a novel compressed bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) representation, random-accessible compressed
bounding volume hierarchies (RACBVHs), for various applications requiring random access on BVHs of massive models. Our RACBVH
representation is compact and transparently supports random access on the compressed BVHs without decompressing the whole BVH.
To support random access on our compressed BVHs, we decompose a BVH into a set of clusters. Each cluster contains consecutive
bounding volume (BV) nodes in the original layout of the BVH. Also, each cluster is compressed separately from other clusters and
serves as an access point to the RACBVH representation. We provide the general BVH access API to transparently access our
RACBVH representation. At runtime, our decompression framework is guaranteed to provide correct BV nodes without decompressing
the whole BVH. Also, our method is extended to support parallel random access that can utilize the multi-core CPU architecture. Our
method can achieve up to a 12:1 compression ratio and, more importantly, can decompress 4.2M BV nodes (= 135 MB) per second
by using a single CPU-core. To highlight the benefits of our approach, we apply our method to two different applications: ray tracing
and collision detection. We can improve the runtime performance by more than a factor of 4 as compared to using the uncompressed
original data. This improvement is a result of the fast decompression performance and reduced data access time by selectively fetching
and decompressing small regions of the compressed BVHs requested by applications.
@article{RACBVH10,
author = {Tae-Joon Kim and Bochang Moon and Duksu Kim and Sung-Eui Yoon},
title = {{RACBVHs}: Random-Accessible Compressed Bounding Volume Hierarchies},
journal = {IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics},
year = {2010},
volume = {16},
number = {2},
pages = {273-286}
}
Presentations
SIGGRAPH 2009 talk
SIGGRAPH 2009 poster, 1st place in ACM SIGGRAPH 2009 Student Research Competition (SRC, sponsored by Microsoft Research)
