A study on the ray-tracing acceleration technique based on the ZF-buffer algorithm

In this work, we propose the ZF-buffer algorithm in order to accelerate the intersection test of ray tracing. The ZF-buffer is used in the preprocessing of ray tracing and records the pointer that points to a parent face of a depth value (z value) of an object determined in the Z-buffer. As a result, the face that intersects with the first ray can be determined easily by using the pointer stored in the F-buffer. Though the ZF-buffer and vista-buffer resemble each other, the difference between the two methods is that what ZF-buffer records is not bounding volume but the pointer of a displayable face. We applied the ZF-buffer algorithm for the first ray to the Utah teapot that consists of 9216 polygons. By comparing the elapse time of our method with the vista-buffer algorithm we can acquire improvement in speed that it is three times faster than the vista-buffer algorithm. We also try to apply our method to reflective objects.