On the reliability of triangle intersection in 3D

  • Authors:
  • Steven Robbins;Sue Whitesides

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montréal, QC, Canada;School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montréal, QC, Canada

  • Venue:
  • ICCSA'03 Proceedings of the 2003 international conference on Computational science and its applications: PartIII
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Implementors of triangle/triangle intersection tests often opt to forego exact calculations for speed reasons. It is widely known that such code will fail for certain inputs, but it is not evident from the literature that published intersection tests implemented using floating-point arithmetic are not stable. We show how such a test can fail on a triangle pair that is widely separated in space. We find that an exact intersection test can be implemented with a modest speed penalty.