Accelerating the ray tracing of height fields

In this paper we apply a run--based ray--traversal algorithm to accelerate the ray tracing of height fields. To intersect the ray and the height field three processes occur: the ray is traversed through the grid that underlies the height field, an intersection between each cell and the ray is sought and if found the intersection point between the ray and the height field is calculated. Run--based ray traversal algorithms, to determine the path of the ray through the height field, have a significant computational advantage over the cell--based traversal algorithms used to date. They also present important structural information that can be used to accelerate the process of determining if and where an intersection has occurred