Hierarchical Indexing for Out-of-Core Access to Multi-Resolution Data

Increases in the number and size of volumetric meshes have popularized the use of hierarchical multi-resolution representations for visualization. A key component of these schemes has become the adaptive traversal of hierarchical data-structures to build, in real time, approximate representations of the input geometry for rendering. For very large datasets this process must be performed out-of-core. This paper introduces a new global indexing scheme that accelerates adaptive traversal of geometric data represented as binary trees by improving the locality of hierarchical/spatial data access. Such improvements play a critical role in the enabling of effective out-of-core processing.