A Survey of Geometric Data Structures for Ray Tracing
TR-CIS-2001-06 Allen Y.Chang
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Abstract:
Ray tracing is a computer graphics technique for generating
photo-realistic images. To determine the color at each pixel of the
image, one traces the path traversed by each ray of light arriving at
the pixel back through several reflections and/or refractions. The
most time-consuming phase of a ray tracer is ray traversal, which
determines for each of a large number of rays, the first object met
by that ray. Many data structures have been proposed to accelerate
this process. This survey describes and compares the construction and
traversal algorithms for a variety of commonly used data structures
from practitioner's point of view.
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