2009 First International Workshop on Education Technology and Computer Science
Research on collision detection algorithm Based on AABB-OBB Bounding Volume
Chaoqiang Tu
Dept. of electronic information engineering
Nanchang University
Nanchang, China
ndrabbit@163.com
Abstract—Collision detection is pretty important in Virtual
Reality, and its speed greatly influences the reality and illusion
of immersion in virtual environment. We propose a collision
detection algorithm of hybrid bounding box based on the
merits of AABB and OBB: AABB-OBB. It is applicable to solid
objects. We construct simpler bounding volume tree and apply
improved data structure to decrease storage space. During the
period of traverse AABB-OBBTree, we have applied single
traverse method to improve the efficiency of collision detection,
and its effect is more obvious especially when the depth of trees
is different greatly.
Keywords-collision detection; AABB; OBB; hybrid bounding
box AABB-OBB
I. INTRODUCTION
Collision detection has been the hot issue in the
computer graphics recently and is very important in many
areas of the virtual environment.
Hierarchical Bounding Box which has been recognized
as a good means of collision detection is widely used. The
basic idea of bounding box is to use simple geometric body
to replace the complex geometric body. First, detecting the
bounding box of the object roughly, only when two
bounding boxes intersect, the geometry bodies they
surround have possibility to intersect. This method can rule
out a large number geometry bodies which can’t intersect.
There are several types of bounding box: Axis-Aligned
Bounding Box[1](AABB),Sphere Box[2],Orientation
Bounding Box[3](OBB), K-Discrete Orientation
Polytopes[4](K-DOPs).
In this paper, we propose a collision detection algorithm
of hybrid bounding box: AABB-OBB which takes the
merits of AABB and OBB. AABB is used in the top level of
the tree. The method improves the efficiency and reduces
the storage space.
II. THE METHOD OF OBB BOUNDING BOX
A. Introduction of OBB
The OBB is a smallest rectangular parallelepiped whose
axis is arbitrary and it contains a given object. It’s a good
application in the bounding box. It is assumed that one
OBB’s center is c. The three orthogonal directions are
v1 , v 2 , v3 and the “radius” in three directions are
r 1 , r 2 , r 3 . Thus the definitive region of OBB is
978-0-7695-3557-9/09 $25.00 © 2009 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ETCS.2009.82
Authorized licensed use limited to: Universitaetsbibliothek der RWTH Aachen. Downloaded on October 09,2023 at 20:59:47 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
Lizhen Yu
Dept. of electronic information engineering
Nanchang University
Nanchang, China
yu1li1zhen1@yahoo.com.cn
R = {c + ar1v1 + br 2 v 2 + cr 3v 3 | a, b, c ∈ (−1,1)} , as
shown in figure(b).
The most prominent feature of the OBB is the
arbitrariness in its direction, which makes it surround the
prescribed object as closely as possible according to the
object’s shape. As shown in figure 1(b). The calculation of
the OBB is more complicated relatively. The key is to find
the best direction and determine the smallest size of
bounding box which surrounds the object in this direction. It
is assumed that the basic geometric element is the triangle
i th triangle are p i , q i , r i . The
and the vertices of the
average u and covariance matrix C of the model is
calculated as follows:
1
u=
3n
∑ ( pi + qi + r i ) (1)
1 n
C jk = ∑
3n i =1
( p ij pki + q ij qki + rji rki ),1 ≤ j , k ≤ 3 (2)
n is the number of triangles, p i = pi − u ,
qi = qi − u , r i = r i − u , and each of them is a vector
R 3 . For example pi = ( p1i , p2i , p3i )T , C is a 3×3
symmetric matrix.
Three characteristic vectors of covariance matrix C are
orthogonal. After the standardization they can be used as
basements that determine the direction of OBB. We calculate
the maximum and minimum of all elements’ vertices in the
three axes of the substrates. Storing an OBB needs 15
float-point numbers (9 float-point numbers to express three
basis vectors of the direction and 6 float-point numbers to
express the scope).
B. Intersection tests between OBBs
Intersection tests between OBBs based on the separation
axis theory. If the projection does not overlap in one axis
between a couple of OBBs, we defined the axis as separation
axis. We can judge the two OBBs are disjoint if two OBBs
exist a separation axis. Therefore, a pair of OBBs only need
test 15 axes which might be separation axis (the pairs of
combinations of each OBB’s three plane directions and three
sides directions). As long as we find a separation axis, the
two OBBs are recognized as disjoint. If these 15 axes can’t
divide the pairs of OBBs, they are intersectant.Though the
331
 cost of the intersection test between OBBs is high, its
tightness is very well. It can reduce the numbers of the
bounding boxes that participate in intersection test and the
basic geometric elements. In addition, if geometric object
rotates, the basement of OBB need rotate too.
III. THE METHOD OF AABB BOUNDING BOX
The AABB is a smallest hexahedron that contains a
given object and each edge of the hexahedron parallels to
coordinate axis. Figure 1(a) is a simplified example of
two-dimensional plane. By traversing all vertex of the object
to find the maximum and minimum of the vertex’s X, Y, Z
coordinates we can construct the AABB. AABB bounding
boxes intersect only when their projective interval in three
axis are all overlapped. The maximum and minimum in the
X, Y, Z directions determine its projective interval in the
3-axis coordinates. Thus intersection tests between AABBs
need comparison operation at most of 6 times. The AABB
two-dimensional plane’s intersection test was shown in
figure 2.
(a) AABB (b) OBB
Figure 1. AABB and OBB bounding box
A B
B A
B
(a)A and B are disjoint
(b)Aand B are intersectant
Figure
Figure 2. 2. Determine
Determine the
the intersection
i i
IV. HYBRID BOUNDING BOX AABB-OBB
A. The method of the hybrid bounding box
The AABB bounding box has simple structure, but has
shortcoming in tightness. So we need to test more couples of
bounding boxes. OBB bounding box has good tightness but
complex structure. So we propose a hybrid bounding box:
AABB-OBB combined the good tightness of OBB and
simple structure of AABB. We adopt AABB bounding box
in the top level of AABB-OBB tree and adopt OBB in the
other levels.
B. The construction of hybrid bounding box
The construction of bounding box tree usually uses two
methods: Top-down[5] and bottom-up[6]. The core of
top-down is how to merge a number of sets into superset.
332
Authorized licensed use limited to: Universitaetsbibliothek der RWTH Aachen. Downloaded on October 09,2023 at 20:59:47 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
The top-down method is used widely and maturely in
technology. We adopt binary tree and use basic elements as
leaf node replace of using bounding box in the basic
geometric elements. The basic element use triangle or
tetrahedron which decided by the usage of surface model or
volume model for modeling method.
The process of a building hybrid bounding box is
described as follows:
• Obtain the required points of each element from the
basic geometric elements' coordinates value
contained in the root node.
• Obtain the bounding box of the node
• Determine the division axis. First, if the element
contained in the bounding box is the basic geometric
element, it can be used as leaf node directly, else,
use the method of dividing the longest axis, that is,
choose the longest axis of the bounding box as the
division axis
• Use median method to determine splitting point and
to locate splitting plane
• Use the method based on splitting plane to divide the
AABB-OBB's element into two subsets
• Use the subsets of AABB-OBB as the root nodes
respectively, return to the step (2), until the basic
geometric element has been divided into leaf node to
form a balance tree
The example of the bounding box tree shows in figure 3.
Figure 3(a) is OBB tree and figure 3(b) is the hybrid
bounding box tree. The diamond in the following graph
represents AABB bounding box, rectangular represents
OBB and triangle represents the basic geometric element.
B
B Br
1
B Br
B Br B Br
1 1
(a) OBB (b)AABB-OBB
Figure 3. The comparision of structure between new and old bounding
box trees
C. The intersection test between bounding boxes and the
intersection tesst between basic elements.
The intersection test between AABB-OBBs, include two
stages. The first stage is to use a simple AABB bounding
box's method to rule out pairs of models that can't intersect.
And the second stage is to judge the OBB's intersection
precisely for pairs of models that are not ruled out.
The intersection test between OBBs is based on the
separation axis theory[7]. We observe whether the bounding
box can intersects when we do the tests. If AABB bounding
boxes do not intersect, then pairs of models won't collide,
despite there would be a possible collision between OBBs.
 This is because the OBB may exceed the scope of the AABB
bounding box.
We used triangle as the basic geometric element. It was
verified that intersection test time between OBB and OBB is
quite equal to that between OBB and basic element or
between the basic elements. That's why we don't use the
bounding box in the elements of the lowest layer. If the next
layer was just the basic elements in the test process, the
intersection test would be run directly. This method not only
improved the speed of testing but also reduced the storage
space.
V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULT
The test was done on a personal computer with 3.00GHz
pentium processor and a 512M memory. We use the
proposed algorithm to test collision detection time of seven
scences. Figure 4 shows the results.
Figure 4. Test for collision detection time
From the result we can see that the performance of the
AABB-OBB algorithm improved by 40--50% compared to
OBB. Especially when one object is far larger than another,
our algorithm has greater advantages. The thinking can be
applied to the virtual surgery project because the scalpel is
333
Authorized licensed use limited to: Universitaetsbibliothek der RWTH Aachen. Downloaded on October 09,2023 at 20:59:47 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
very smaller than human organ and our algorithm requires
less storage space.
VI. CONCLUSION
At present, the bounding box used to carry out bounding
box collision detection algorithm at home and abroad is all
single bounding box. After comparision of AABB and OBB,
the AABB-OBB provides a new way of thinking for the
development of real time interactivity in virtual reality. The
performance of the proposed algorithm is better than that of
the original algorithm and the data structure takes up less
storage space. Our future work is to broaden the range of the
algorithm and use it in the software model. This is also a
field which needs to be solved in the virtual reality
technology.
REFERENCES
[1] G van den Bergen, “Efficient Collision Detection of Complex
Deformable Models using AABB Trees,” Journal of Graphics Tools,
vol. 2, 1997, pp. 1-13.
[2] P M Hubbard, “Collision Detection for Interactive Graphics
Applications,” IEEE Transaction on Visualization and Computer
Graphics, vol. 1, 1995, pp. 218-230.
[3] S Gottschalk, M C Lin, D. Manocha, “OBB-Tree: A Hierarchical
Structure for Rapid Interference Detection,” Proceedings of
SIGGRAPH, vol. 96, 1996, pp. 171-180.
[4] He Yu, Chen Li hui, “A novel nonparametric clustering algorithm for
discovering arbitrary sharped clusters,” Proceedings of the 2003 Joint
Conference of the Fourth International Conference, vol. 32, Dec.
2003, pp. 1826-1830.
[5] N. Greene, “Detecting Intersection of a Rectangular Solid and a
CoNbex Polyhedron. P.S. Heckbert,” editor, Graphics Gems IV,
1994, pp. 74-82.
[6] G. Zachmann, “Exact and Fast Collision Detection. Diploma thesis,
Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics,” Technische Hochschule
Darmstadt, Fachbereich Informatik, 1994.
[7] S. Gottschalk, M. Lin, D. Manocha, “OBBTree: A Hierarchical
Structure for Rapid Interference Detection,” In Proceedings of ACM
Siggraph,”1996, pp. 171-180.