Jiří Bittner is an associate professor at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague. He received his Ph.D. in 2003 at the same institute. His research interests include visibility computations, real-time rendering, spatial data structures, and global illumination. He participated in a number of national and international research projects and also several commercial projects dealing with real-time rendering of complex scenes. His talk took place on Wednesday, June 10, 1pm in room E104.

Recent Advances in Bounding Volume Hierarchies for Ray Tracing

Abstract: In my talk I will briefly survey the usage of bounding volume hierarchies (BVH) for ray tracing acceleration. I will present a technique optimizing bounding volume hierarchies using insertion based global optimization procedure that leads to hierarchies of higher quality compared to the previous state of the art methods. I will also discuss a modification of this technique for the incremental construction of BVH and outline the usage of the incremental construction for real-time ray tracing of complex models streamed over a network. I will further present a method allowing to construct a single BVH optimized for all frames of a given animation sequence. I will conclude my talk by presenting a new ray tracing acceleration technique combining BVHs and ray space hierarchies that allows to perform real-time ray tracing of complex scenes that do not fit into the memory of the GPU.