Quick Elimination of Non-Interference Polytopes

The problem of collision detection is fundamental to interactive applications such as computer animation and virtual environments. In these fields, prompt recognition of possible impacts is important for computing real-time response. However, existing algorithms do not eliminate noninterfence objects efficiently. This paper presents a practical algorithm to quickly eliminate most non-interference convex polyhedra when their bounding boxes overlap. The idea is to search for a proper separating plane between two polyhedra and cache this plane as a witness for the next time step. Temporal and geometric coherences are exploited in this algorithm so that it runs in expected constant time.