A Formal Framework for Analysis and Comparison of Ray Casting Acceleration Techniques

The ray-scene intersection test is the most costly process when a scene is rendered. This process may be improved using any strategy to be able to speed-up it. Generally, any strategy used is based on the building of a spatial indexing in the scene domain or in the rays domain. However, there is no theory to formalize these techniques. In this paper, an acceleration techniques formalization is proposed. This formalization allows an optimizer to be specified according to the spatial index used. Furthermore, a formalization of optimizer composition is presented. Finally, we present an expression which allows to compare several optimizers, and select the one with best performances. This formalization is based on the graphics objects theory and claims to be a generalization to all optimizers which use spatial indexing.

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