Bounding Volume Hierarchy - BVH Design Issues

BVH Design Issues

The choice of bounding volume is determined by a trade-off between two objectives. On the one hand, we would like to use bounding volumes that have a very simple shape. Thus, we need only a few bytes to store them, and intersection tests and distance computations are simple and fast. On the other hand, we would like to have bounding volumes that fit the corresponding data objects very tightly. One of the most commonly used bounding volumes is an axis-aligned minimum bounding box. The axis-aligned minimum bounding box for a given set of data objects is easy to compute, needs only few bytes of storage, and robust intersection tests are easy to implement and extremely fast.

There are several desired properties for a BVH that should be taken into consideration when designing one for a specific application:

• The nodes contained in any given sub-tree should be near each other. The lower down the tree, the nearer the nodes should be to each other.
• Each node in the BVH should be of minimum volume.
• The sum of all bounding volumes should be minimal.
• Greater attention should be paid to nodes near the root of the BVH. Pruning a node near the root of the tree removes more objects from further consideration.
• The volume of overlap of sibling nodes should be minimal.
• The BVH should be balanced with respect to both its node structure and its content. Balancing allows as much of the BVH as possible to be pruned whenever a branch is not traversed into.

In terms of the structure of BVH, it has to be decided what degree (the number of children) and height to use in the tree representing the BVH. A tree of a low degree will be of greater height. That increases root-to-leaf traversal time. On the other hand, less work has to be expended at each visited node to check its children for overlap. The opposite holds for a high-degree tree: although the tree will be of smaller height, more work is spent at each node. In practice, binary trees (degree = 2) are by far the most common. One of the main reasons is that binary trees are easier to build.