A novel ray tracing acceleration method based on bounding volumes and prior environment processing

Ray tracing has been successfully used in prediction of wave propagation models in recent years. Although this method has its own obvious benefits, it suffers from a big problem: slow performance. In this paper, a novel method is proposed in which the main focus is on reducing the number of ray-facet intersections. It combines a volume bounding algorithm and a light-weight pre-processing operation on the environment which is completely independent of the locations of source and target and is performed once for each environment. In this step, measures for the distances between entities in the environment are computed and saved. Later in the main procedure, theses data will come to help reduce the number of ray-facet intersection tests dramatically.