Building a BVH-optimal for foveated ray tracing (C++)

I wrote my master thesis in the field of computer graphics, under the supervision of Dr. ing. Tobias Ritschel (University College London) and Dr. ing. Jacco Bikker (Utrecht University). The topic of my research was creating a bounding volume hierarchy adapted to foveated rendering and was awarded with a 9.0/10. 

In the study, I combined two existing approaches to reduce the computational costs of ray tracing by presenting an adaptive bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) builder for foveated ray tracing. It shows that when rays are unevenly distributed over the screen, the total time to image can be reduced by adapting the BVH builder such that the quality of the BVH is likewise uneven over the scene. This is done by predicting which nodes of the BVH fall onto the foveal region, for which four foveal density prediction methods are proposed that perform well in different scenarios. This success is robust against varying foveal settings such as foveal size and ray density. The findings are supported by statistical analyses that show a large effect size for the improvement of the adaptive BVH builder’s performance over standard uniform build methods. 

For more information, I refer the reader to the posted video dissemination which explains my approach and main findings or ask me to send you the full thesis.