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Geometry transition method to improve ray-tracing precision

Multimedia Tools and Applications volume 75, pages 5689–5700 (2016)Cite this article

Abstract

We propose a method for moving the view position to the origin and moving the coordinates of primitives so that they are at the same distance in order to improve ray-tracing precision. This approach exploits the principle that a floating-point number provides higher precision near zero. In this way, we can significantly reduce the number of self-intersections occurring in ray tracing that are caused by limited floating-point precision. The experimental results show that the number of self-intersections is reduced by up to 84.6 %. We also propose a hardware approach to resolve the computational overhead in the proposed algorithm. Its contribution to the hardware size is very small in comparison with the size of the entire ray-tracing hardware.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (NRF-2012R1A1A2004624).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Engineering, Sejong University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

    Dongseok Kim & Woo-Chan Park

  2. LG electronics, Seoul, Republic of Korea

    Jae-Ho Nah

Authors
  1. Dongseok Kim
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  2. Jae-Ho Nah
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  3. Woo-Chan Park
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Correspondence to Woo-Chan Park.

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Kim, D., Nah, JH. & Park, WC. Geometry transition method to improve ray-tracing precision. Multimed Tools Appl 75, 5689–5700 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-015-2534-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-015-2534-4

Keywords

  • 3D graphics
  • Ray tracing
  • Rendering artifact
  • Floating-point arithmetic