Fast Ray/Axis-Aligned Bounding Box Overlap Tests using Ray Slopes

Martin Eisemann and Marcus Magnor
Computer Graphics Lab, TU Braunschweig

Thorsten Grosch and Stefan Müller
University of Koblenz-Landau

This paper appears in issue Volume 12, Number 4.
An electronic version of this article is available.

Abstract

This paper proposes a new method for fast ray/axis-aligned bounding box overlap tests. This method tests the slope of a ray against an axis-aligned bounding box by projecting itself and the box onto the three planes orthogonal to the world-coordinate axes and performs the tests on them separately. The method is division-free, and successive calculations are independent of each other. No intersection distance is computed, but it can be added easily. Test results show the technique is up to 18% faster than any other method known to us and 14% faster on average for a wide variety of different test scenes and different processor architectures.

Author Information

Martin Eisemann, Computer Graphics Lab, TU Braunschweig, Mühlenpfordstrasse 23 38106 Braunschweig, Germany eisemann@cg.tu-bs.de

Thorsten Grosch, Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Stuhlsatzenhausweg 85 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany tgrosch@mpi-inf.mpg.de

Stefan Müller, University of Koblenz-Landau, Campus Koblenz, Universitätsstrasse 1 56070 Koblenz, Germany stefan.mueller@uni-koblenz.de

Marcus Magnor, Computer Graphics Lab, TU Braunschweig, Mühlenpfordstrasse 23 38106 Braunschweig, Germany magnor@cg.tu-bs.de

Source Code

BibTeX Entry

@article{EisemannEtAl07,
  author = "Martin Eisemann and Thorsten Grosch and Stefan Müller and Marcus Magnor",
  title = "Fast Ray/Axis-Aligned Bounding Box Overlap Tests using Ray Slopes",
  journal = "journal of graphics, gpu, and game tools",
  volume = "12",
  number = "4",
  pages = "35-46",
  year = "2007",
}