An Efficient and Robust Ray-Box Intersection Algorithm

Amy Williams
MIT CSAIL

Steve Barrus, R. Keith Morley, and Peter Shirley
University of Utah

This paper appears in issue Volume 10, Number 1.
Purchase this issue from the akpeters.com web site.

Abstract

The computational bottleneck in a ray tracer using bounding volume hierarchies is often the ray intersection routine with axis-aligned bounding boxes. We describe a version of this routine that uses IEEE numerical properties to ensure that those tests are both robust and efficient. Sample source code is available online.

Author Information

Amy Williams, MIT CSAIL, Room 32-G728, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02139 amy@mit.edu

Steve Barrus, University of Utah, Computer Science Department, 50 Central Campus Drive, Salt Lake City, UT 84112 sbarrus@cs.utah.edu

R. Keith Morley, 9 Lawrence Drive, Apt. 101, Princeton, NJ 08540 rmorley@cs.princeton.edu

Peter Shirley, University of Utah, Computer Science Department, 50 Central Campus Drive, Salt Lake City, UT 84112 shirley@cs.utah.edu

Source Code

Sample C++ source code for the optimized method described in the paper is available here: box.tar.gz (4K gzip tar format)

BibTeX Entry

@article{WilliamsEtAl05,
  author = "Amy Williams and Steve Barrus and R. Keith Morley and Peter Shirley",
  title = "An Efficient and Robust Ray-Box Intersection Algorithm",
  journal = "journal of graphics tools",
  volume = "10",
  number = "1",
  pages = "49-54",
  year = "2005",
}