Simple and fast ray tracing of point-based geometry

We discuss in this paper a framework for simple and fast ray tracing of point-based geometry. Our solution requires neither implicit surface definition nor the use of non-simple rays. Points are simply treated as disk primitives. To prevent shading artifacts due to the use of disk representation, each ray is intersected with a few disks, and the intersection results interpolated. Further, to speed up the ray-object search, we adapt the KD-tree with bounding spheres structure applied in the QSplat point splatting system (Rusinkiewicz and Levoy 2000). Our prototype implementation is generally competitive compared to previous point set ray tracers. Further it demonstrates considerable speedup over a point set ray tracer based on a conventional KD-tree, while producing images with acceptable ray-traced quality.