Evaluation of splitting methods in top-down OBB-tree construction

The Oriented Bounding Box trees (OBB-trees) offer efficient means for real-time collision detection between geometric models. The efficiency of the OBB-tree in answering the queries depends mainly on the way the triangles are splitted and distributed to the child nodes. In this paper we examine four different partitioning methods for top-down construction of OBB-trees and compare their performance in three different types of queries: collision detection between two objects, finding the triangle closest to a given point and extremal point queries. In addition to the examined methods we also offer a method for determining and splitting disconnected sets of triangles at an early stage during the hierarchy construction.