A Method to Order Point Clouds for Visualization on the Ray Tracing Pipeline

Currently, the digitization of environment objects (vegetation, terrain, architectural structures, etc.) in the form of point clouds is actively being developed. The integration of such digitized objects into virtual environment systems allows the quality of the modeled environment to be improved, but requires efficient methods and algorithms for real-time visualization of large point volumes. In this paper the solution of this task on modern multicore GPUs with support of hardware-accelerated ray tracing is researched. A modified method is proposed where the original unordered point cloud is split up into point groups whose visualization is effectively parallelized on ray tracing cores. The paper describes an algorithm for constructing such groups using swapping arrays of point indices, which works faster than alternative solutions based on linked lists, and also has lower memory overhead. The proposed method and algorithm were implemented in point cloud visualization software complex and approbated on a number of digitized environment objects. The results of the approbation confirmed the efficiency of proposed solutions as well as their applicability for virtual environment systems, video simulators, geoinformation systems, virtual laboratories, etc.