Incremental BVH construction for ray tracing

We propose a new method for incremental construction of Bounding Volume Hierarchies (BVHs). Despite the wide belief that the incremental construction of BVH is inefficient we show that our method incrementally constructs a BVH with quality comparable to the best SAH builders. We illustrate the versatility of the proposed method using a flexible parallelization scheme that opens new possibilities for combining different BVH construction heuristics. We demonstrate the usage of the method in a proof-of-concept application for real-time preview of data streamed over the network. We believe that our method will renew the interest in incremental BVH construction and it will find its applications in ray tracing based remote visualizations and fast previews or in interactive scene editing applications handling very large data sets. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.