Temporal coherence in bounding volume hierarchies for collision detection

Collision detection is a fundamental problem in computer graphics. In this paper, temporal coherence is studied and an algorithm exploiting it for bounding volume hierarchies, is presented. We show that maintaining some of the intersection tests computed in the previous frame, along with certain information, is able to speedup the intersection tests considerably. The algorithm is able to accelerate the collision detection for small motions and works as fast as the regular algorithm for large motions, where temporal coherence does not exist. The algorithm framework can be implemented for any type of bounding volume hierarchy. To demonstrate this, it was implemented for the OBB and the AABB data structures and tested on several benchmark scenarios.