Incremental 3D collision detection with hierarchical data structures

Abstract

3D collision detection is the most timeconsuming component of many geometric reasoning applications. Any improvements on the efficiency of the collision detection module may have a great impact on the overall performance of these applications. Most efficient collision detection algorithms in the literature use some sort of hierarchical bounding volumes, such as spheres or oriented bounding boxes, to reduce the number of calls to expensive collision checks between polygons. In this paper, we propose an incremental scheme that takes advantage of spatial coherence to improve the performance of this class of algorithms. Experiments have been conducted on a sphere-tree structure for several moving objects. Consistent improvements ranging from 70 to 90 percents were observed. These numbers are actually very close to the theoretical upper bound for such improvements. © 1998 ACM.