Efficient Image-Based Proximity Queries with Object-Space Precision

• Published in: Computer graphics forum Vol. 31; no. 1; pp. 62 - 74
• Main Authors: Morvan, T., Reimers, M., Samset, E.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford, UK Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.02.2012
• Subjects: Algorithms; Analysis; Central processing units; collision detection; Computer graphics; GPU; Hierarchies; I.3.5 [Computer Graphics]: Geometric Algorithms; I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Animation; I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Animation, virtual reality; Image processing systems; image-based algorithms; Proximity; proximity queries; proximity queries, collision detection, GPU, image‐based algorithms; Queries; Real time; Representations; Studies; Triangles; virtual reality
• ISSN: 0167-7055; 1467-8659
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8659.2011.02084.x

We present an efficient algorithm for object‐space proximity queries between multiple deformable triangular meshes. Our approach uses the rasterization capabilities of the GPU to produce an image‐space representation of the vertices. Using this image‐space representation, inter‐object vertex‐triangle distances and closest points lying under a user‐defined threshold are computed in parallel by conservative rasterization of bounding primitives and sorted using atomic operations. We additionally introduce a similar technique to detect penetrating vertices. We show how mechanisms of modern GPUs such as mipmapping, Early‐Z and Early‐Stencil culling can optimize the performance of our method. Our algorithm is able to compute dense proximity information for complex scenes made of more than a hundred thousand triangles in real time, outperforming a CPU implementation based on bounding volume hierarchies by more than an order of magnitude.