An acceleration technique for Ray Tracing simulation based on a shadow volumetric binary and line space partitioning

Author(s):  
S. Santini ◽  
S. Bertini ◽  
A. Monorchio
Author(s):  
Daqi Lin ◽  
Elena Vasiou ◽  
Cem Yuksel ◽  
Daniel Kopta ◽  
Erik Brunvand

Bounding volume hierarchies (BVH) are the most widely used acceleration structures for ray tracing due to their high construction and traversal performance. However, the bounding planes shared between parent and children bounding boxes is an inherent storage redundancy that limits further improvement in performance due to the memory cost of reading these redundant planes. Dual-split trees can create identical space partitioning as BVHs, but in a compact form using less memory by eliminating the redundancies of the BVH structure representation. This reduction in memory storage and data movement translates to faster ray traversal and better energy efficiency. Yet, the performance benefits of dual-split trees are undermined by the processing required to extract the necessary information from their compact representation. This involves bit manipulations and branching instructions which are inefficient in software. We introduce hardware acceleration for dual-split trees and show that the performance advantages over BVHs are emphasized in a hardware ray tracing context that can take advantage of such acceleration. We provide details on how the operations needed for decoding dual-split tree nodes can be implemented in hardware and present experiments in a number of scenes with different sizes using path tracing. In our experiments, we have observed up to 31% reduction in render time and 38% energy saving using dual-split trees as compared to binary BVHs representing identical space partitioning.


Proceedings ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (13) ◽  
pp. 1056
Author(s):  
Marcus Baumgart ◽  
Norbert Druml ◽  
Markus Dielacher ◽  
Cristina Consani

Robust, fast and reliable examination of the surroundings is essential for further advancements in autonomous driving and robotics. Time-of-Flight (ToF) camera sensors are a key technology to measure surrounding objects and their distances on a pixel basis in real-time. Environmental effects, like rain in front of the sensor, can influence the distance accuracy of the sensor. Here we use an optical ray-tracing based procedure to examine the rain effect on the ToF image. Simulation results are presented for experimental rain droplet distributions, characteristic of intense rainfall at rates of 25 mm/h and 100 mm/h. The ray-tracing based simulation data and results serve as an input for developing and testing rain signal suppression strategies.


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