Geometric Hashing for Processing Complex Scenes

This work presents a new technique for handling many object interaction schemes developed using a graph theoretic approach. The interaction can be optical, as in ray tracing, or geometric, as in many body collision. Other problems solved by ray tracing, such as mass and volume calculation and viewing of Boolean set expressions, also benefit from this method. The new methods are compared to previous work. A solution is obtained by viewing the situation as a search problem. Analogies of existing methods with searching and sorting are investigated and a general method is developed. An advantage of the general method is that it is independent of the representation being used to model the objects.