Hacker's Delight

14-7. Applications

Space-filling curves have applications in image processing: compression, halftoning, and textural analysis [L&S]. Another application is to improve computer performance in ray tracing, a graphics-rendering technique. Conventionally, a scene is scanned by projecting rays across the scene in ordinary raster scan line order (left to right across the screen, and then top to bottom). When a ray hits an object in the simulated scene’s database, the color and other properties of the object at that point are determined and the results are used to illuminate the pixel through which the ray was sent. (This is an oversimplification, but it’s adequate for our purposes.) One problem is that the database is often large and the data on each ...