Talk:Linear octrees

proposal for more details
Linear Octree. The linear octree is a variety of pointerless octree in which only leaf nodes are stored, and allocated contiguously in memory. This method was originally proposed by Gargantini for quadtrees [Gar82]. Linear octrees make use of an interleaved base-8 code similar to that proposed by Morton for traditional octrees [Mor66]. The important difference lies in storage: rather than connect the leaf nodes via interior nodes, the leaf nodes are sorted by locational code and then laid out sequentially in memory. Then, rather than matching the Morton code segment with the correct child at each depth of the octree, point location consists of a binary search on the sorted array of leaves. This binary search performs node lookup in O(log2(L)) in a tree with L leaf nodes; as opposed to O(log8(N)) complexity for a pointer octree with N total nodes. Except in the case of highly vertical trees with few leaf nodes relative to interior nodes, the linear octree is generally slower to hash. The major advantage is that it requires storage of neither pointers nor interior nodes. In applications where storage is of the utmost importance, and we only care about leaf nodes, the linear octree is an attractive structure. Thus far, no one has directly applied the linear octree to volume rendering. However, it is an intriguing structure in it potential compression abilities. As compression is one of the main goals of adaptive octree methods on volume data, it is worth mentioning this structure.

octsurvey.pdf —Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.254.37.243 (talk) 05:40, 18 June 2009 (UTC)