Comparing Hierarchical Data Structures for Sparse Volume Rendering with Empty Space Skipping

TL;DR

This paper compares various hierarchical data structures for sparse volume rendering with empty space skipping, analyzing their construction and rendering performance to identify potential trade-offs similar to those in surface ray tracing.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive performance comparison of multiple hierarchical data structures for volume rendering, highlighting their construction and rendering trade-offs.

Findings

Hierarchical data structures show a trade-off between construction and rendering performance.

Performance differences depend on data topology and structure choice.

Results guide optimal data structure selection for volume rendering applications.

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.