Point in Polygon Tests Using Hardware Accelerated Ray Tracing

Abstract

Recent generations of GPUs have seen the introduction of hardware-accelerated ray tracing algorithms that are suitable for real-time use. They provide hardware for massively parallel ray-geometry intersection computations, indicating a highly optimized spatial data structure derived from arbitrary triangle-based geometries. Spatial join is an ubiquitous problem in spatial databases, GIS applications, spatial statistics, and similar applications. On a fundamental level, spatial joins are based on point in polygon tests (PIP). We suggest exploiting the capabilities of ray tracing hardware to perform fast parallel point in polygon tests in order to implement hardware-accelerated spatial joins.