Real-time KD-tree construction on graphics hardware

We present an algorithm for constructing kd-trees on GPUs. This algorithm achieves real-time performance by exploiting the GPU's streaming architecture at all stages of kd-tree construction. Unlike previous parallel kd-tree algorithms, our method builds tree nodes completely in BFS (breadth-first search) order. We also develop a special strategy for large nodes at upper tree levels so as to further exploit the fine-grained parallelism of GPUs. For these nodes, we parallelize the computation over all geometric primitives instead of nodes at each level. Finally, in order to maintain kd-tree quality, we introduce novel schemes for fast evaluation of node split costs. As far as we know, ours is the first real-time kd-tree algorithm on the GPU. The kd-trees built by our algorithm are of comparable quality as those constructed by off-line CPU algorithms. In terms of speed, our algorithm is significantly faster than well-optimized single-core CPU algorithms and competitive with multi-co...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TOG
• Authors: Kun Zhou, Qiming Hou, Rui Wang 0004, Baining Guo
• Keywords: Algorithm, CPU Algorithms, Kd-tree Algorithm, TOG 2008