  Empty space skipping can be efficiently implemented with hierarchical data
structures such as k-d trees and bounding volume hierarchies. This paper
compares several recently published hierarchical data structures with regard to
construction and rendering performance. The papers that form our prior work
have primarily focused on interactively building the data structures and only
showed that rendering performance is superior to using simple acceleration data
structures such as uniform grids with macro cells. In the area of surface ray
tracing, there exists a trade-off between construction and rendering
performance of hierarchical data structures. In this paper we present
performance comparisons for several empty space skipping data structures in
order to determine if such a trade-off also exists for volume rendering with
uniform data topologies.
