Hierarchical back-face culling for collision detection

A few years ago, Vanecek (1994) suggested to apply a variant of back-face culling to speed-up collision detection between polyhedral objects. However, Vanecek´s method is linear in the number of faces in the object, which is unpractical for large models. This paper suggests to add some geometrical information to hierarchies of bounding volumes, typically used in collision detection, and perform conservative back-face culling at the bounding-volume level in constant time. The method described in this paper can be applied to complement any kind of bounding-volumes hierarchy and allows a trade-off between memory and speed. Preliminary experimental results suggest that the method allows a significant speed-up, especially in close proximity situations.