A Linear Time BVH Construction Algorithm for Sparse Volumes

Abstract

While fast spatial index construction for triangle meshes has gained a lot of attention from the research community in recent years, fast tree construction algorithms for volume data are still rare and usually do not focus on real-time processing. We propose a linear time bounding volume hierarchy construction algorithm based on a popular method for surface ray tracing of triangle meshes that we adapt for direct volume rendering with sparse volumes. We aim at interactive to real-time construction rates and evaluate our algorithm using a GPU implementation.