Fast kd -Tree Construction for 3D-Rendering Algorithms Like Ray Tracing

Many computer graphics rendering algorithms and techniques use ray tracing for generation of natural and photo-realistic images. The efficiency of the ray tracing algorithms depends, among other techniques, upon the data structures used in the background. kd-trees are some of the most commonly used data structures for accelerating ray tracing algorithms. Data structures using cost optimization techniques based upon Surface Area Heuristics (SAH) are generally considered to be best and of high quality. During the last decade, the trend has been moved from off-line rendering towards real time rendering with the introduction of high speed computers and dedicated Graphical Processing Units (GPUs). In this situation, SAH-optimized structures have been considered too slow to allow real-time rendering of complex scenes. Our goal is to demonstrate an accelerated approach in building SAH-based data structures to be used in real time rendering algorithms. The quality of SAH-based data structures heavily depends upon split-plane locations and the major bottleneck of SAH techniques is the time consumed to find those optimum split locations. We present a parabolic interpolation technique combined with a golden section search criteria for predicting kd-tree split plane locations. The resulted structure is 30% faster with 6% quality degradation as compared to a standard SAH approach for reasonably complex scenes with around 170k polygons.