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I have got a 3D grid (voxels), where some of the voxels are filled, and some are not. The 3D grid is sparsely filled, so I have got a set filledVoxels with coordinates (x, y, z) of the filled voxels. What I am trying to do is find out is for each filled voxel, how many neighboring voxels are filled too.

Here is an example:

  • filledVoxels contains the voxels (1, 1, 1), (1, 2, 1), and (1, 3, 1).
  • Therefore, the neighbor counts are:
    • (1,1,1) has 1 neighbor
    • (1,2,1) has 2 neighbors
    • (1,3,1) has 1 neighbor.

Right now I have this algorithm:

voxelCount = new Map<Voxel, Integer>();

for (voxel v in filledVoxels)
  count = checkAllNeighbors(v, filledVoxels);
  voxelCount[v] = count;

checkAllNeighbors() looks up all 26 surrounding voxels. So in total I am doing 26*filledVoxels.size() lookups, which is quite slow.

Is there any way to cut down the number of required lookups? When you look at the above example you can see that I am checking the same voxels several times, so it might be possible to get rid of lookups with some clever caching.

If this helps in any way, the voxels represent a voxelized 3D surface (but there might be holes in it). I usually want to get a list of all voxels that have 5 or 6 neighbors.

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You should probably add some information about ordering of the elements in the filledVoxels array. Without this information, answering this question can only be based on guesswork. –  PatrickvL Jun 15 '09 at 8:02
It doesn't reduce the number of required lookups, but your problem looks embarassingly parallelisable. –  Trillian Oct 12 '10 at 19:32

8 Answers 8

up vote 5 down vote accepted

You can transform your voxel space into a octree in which every node contains a flag that specifies whether it contains filled voxels at all.

When a node does not contain filled voxels, you don't need to check any of its descendants.

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This helps for very sparse data sets, or localized data sets (most voxels are close to other voxels), but only requires one lookup per voxel. For voxel spaces with more than 25% randomly distributed voxels it wouldn't help much. –  Adam Davis Oct 12 '10 at 19:37

If you're marching along the voxels one at a time, you can keep a lookup table corresponding to the grid, so that after you've checked it once using IsFullVoxel() you put the value in this grid. For each voxel you're marching in you can check if its lookup table value is valid, and only call IsFullVoxel() it it isn't.

OTOH it seems like you can't avoid iterating over all neighboring voxels, either using IsFullVoxel() or the LUT. If you had some more a priori information it could help. For instance, if you knew that there were at most x neighboring filled voxels, or you knew that there were at most y neighboring filled voxels in each direction. For instance, if you know you're looking for voxels with 5 to 6 neighbors, you can stop after you've found 7 full neighbors or 22 empty neighbors.

I'm assuming that a function IsFullVoxel() exists that returns true if a voxel is full.

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Hi, I think there is some missunderstanding, filledVoxels.size() gives me the number of all filled voxels. I iterate this set and for each entry I perform the 26 lookups to count the neighbors –  martinus Jun 13 '09 at 17:23

Um, your question is not very clear. I'm assuming you just have a list of the filled points. In that case, this is going to be very slow, because you have to iterate through it (or use some kind of tree structure such as a kd-tree, but this will still be O(log n)).

If you can (i.e. the grid is not too big), just make a 3d array of bools. 26 lookups in a 3d array shouldn't really take that long (and there really is no way to cut down on the number of lookups).

Actually, now that I think of it, you could make it a 3d array of longs (64 bits). Each 64 bit block would hold 64 (4 x 4 x 4) voxels. When you are checking the neighbors of a voxel in the middle of the block, you could do a single 64 bit read (which would be much faster).

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If most of the moves in your iteration were to neighbors, you could reduce your checking by around 25% by not looking back at the ones you just checked before you made the step.

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I'd say if each of your lookups is slow (O(size)), you should optimize it by binary search in an ordered list (O(log(size))).

The constant 26, I wouldn't worry much. If you iterate smarter, you could cache something and have 26 -> 10 or something, I think, but unless you have profiled the whole application and found out decisively that it is the bottleneck I would concentrate on something else.

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As ilya states, there's not much you can do to get around the 26 neighbor look-ups. You have to make your biggest gains in efficiently identifying whether a given neighbor is filled or not. Given that the brute force solution is essentially O(N^2), you have a lot of possible ground to gain in that area. Since you have to iterate over all filled voxels at least once, I would take an approach similar to the following:

voxelCount = new Map<Voxel, Integer>();
visitedVoxels = new EfficientSpatialDataType();

for (voxel v in filledVoxels)
  for (voxel n in neighbors(v))
    if (visitedVoxels.contains(n))

For your efficient spatial data type, a kd-tree, as Zifre suggested, might be a good idea. In any case, you're going to want to reduce your search space by binning visited voxels.

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You may find a Z-order curve a useful concept here. It lets you (with certain provisos) keep a sliding window of data around the point you're currently querying, so that when you move to the next point, you don't have to throw away many of the queries you've already performed.

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You will, at minimum, have to perform at least 1 lookup per voxel. Since that's the minimum, then any algorithm which only performs one lookup per voxel will meet your requirement.

One simplistic idea is to initialize an array to hold the count for each voxel, then look at each voxel and increment the neighbors of that voxel in the array.

Pseudo C might look something like this:

#define MAXX 100
#define MAXY 100
#define MAXZ 100

int x, y, z
char countArray[MAXX][MAXY][MAXZ];

initializeCountArray(MAXX, MAXY, MAXZ);  // Set all array elements to 0

for(x=0; x<MAXX; x++)

You'll need to write initializeCountArray so it sets all array elements to 0.

More importantly you'll also need to write incrementNeighbors so that it won't increment outside the array. A slight speed increase here is to only perform the above algorithm on all voxels on the interior, then do a separate run on all the outside edge voxels with a modified incrementNeighbrs routine that understands there won't be neighbors on one side.

This algorithm results in 1 lookup per voxel, and at most 26 byte additions per voxel. If your voxel space is sparse then this will result in very few (relative) additions. If your voxel space is very dense, you might consider reversing the algorithm - initialize the array to the value of 26 for each entry, then decrement the neighbors when a voxel doesn't exist.

The results for a given voxel (ie, how many neighbors do I have?) reside in the array. If you need to know how many neighbors voxel 2,3,5 has, just look at the byte in countArray[2][3][5].

The array will consume 1 byte per voxel. You could use less space, and possibly increase the speed a little bit by packing the bytes.

There are better algorithms if you know details about your data. For instance, a very sparse voxel space will benefit greatly from an octree, where you can skip large blocks of lookups when you already know there are no filled voxels inside. Most of these algorithms, however, would still require at least one lookup per voxel to fill their matrix, but if you are performing several operations then they may benefit more than this one operation.

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