A Versatile and Efficient GPU Data Structure for Spatial Indexing

Jens Schneider and Peter Rautek

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Vol.23, No.1 (Proceedings IEEE Scientific Visualization 2016), pp. 911-920 , 2017

In this paper we present a novel GPU-based data structure for spatial indexing. Based on Fenwick trees-a special type of binary indexed trees-our data structure allows construction in linear time. Updates and prefixes can be computed in logarithmic time, whereas point queries require only constant time on average. Unlike competing data structures such as summed-area tables and spatial hashing, our data structure requires a constant amount of bits for each data element, and it offers unconstrained point queries. This property makes our data structure ideally suited for applications requiring unconstrained indexing of large data, such as block-storage of large and block-sparse volumes. Finally, we provide asymptotic bounds on both run-time and memory requirements, and we show applications for which our new data structure is useful.

@article{Schneider2017Fenwick,
  title = {A Versatile and Efficient GPU Data Structure for Spatial Indexing},
  author = {Schneider, Jens and Rautek, Peter},
  journal = {IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (Proceedings IEEE Scientific Visualization 2016)},
  year = {2017},
  volume = {23},
  number = {1},
  pages = {911--920},
}