Glossary

Glossary

• bounding volume: a closed volume of a specific kind that contains a given object (e.g., box, sphere, k-DOP).
• BVH: Bounding Volume Hierarchy, a tree structure on a set of geometric objects to accelerate a spatial search. All geometric objects are wrapped in bounding volumes that form the leaf nodes of the tree. An alternative to k-d tree.
• callback: a user-defined function executed upon finding a primitive that satisfies a predicate.
• predicate: an object carrying information about the search task. Typically combines a geometric object (that is used to identify close objects) with additional data (such as a radius or a number of nearest neighbors). A spatial predicate returns true or false when acted upon a bounding volume (*e.g., predicate based on checking intersection of a sphere with a bounding volume, used for radius-based search). A nearest predicate searches for a given number of nearest neighbors.
• primitive: a geometric object that is boundable, i.e. that can be contained within a bounding volume (e.g., triangle, sphere, point, box).