{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,2,20]],"date-time":"2026-02-20T12:58:07Z","timestamp":1771592287316,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":28,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"22","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2019,11,12]],"date-time":"2019-11-12T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1573516800000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["41571341"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["41571341"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Remote Sensing"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Three-dimensional (3D) radiative transfer models are the most accurate remote sensing models. However, presently the application of 3D models to heterogeneous Earth scenes is a computationally intensive task. A common approach to reduce computation time is abstracting the landscape elements into simpler geometries (e.g., ellipsoid), which, however, may introduce biases. Here, a hybrid scene structuring approach is proposed to accelerate the radiative transfer simulations while keeping the scene as realistic as possible. In a first step, a 3D description of the Earth landscape with equal-sized voxels is optimized to keep only non-empty voxels (i.e., voxels that contain triangles) and managed using a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH). For any voxel that contains triangles, within-voxel BVHs are created to accelerate the ray\u2013triangle intersection tests. The hybrid scheme is implemented in the Discrete Anisotropic Radiative Transfer (DART) model by integrating the Embree ray-tracing kernels developed at Intel. In this paper, the performance of the hybrid algorithm is compared with the original uniform grid approach implemented in DART for a 3D city scene and a forest scene. Results show that the removal of empty voxels can accelerate urban simulation by 1.4\u00d7~3.7\u00d7, and that the within-voxel BVH can accelerate forest simulations by up to 258.5\u00d7.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/rs11222637","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2019,11,13]],"date-time":"2019-11-13T09:11:27Z","timestamp":1573636287000},"page":"2637","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":8,"title":["Hybrid Scene Structuring for Accelerating 3D Radiative Transfer Simulations"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"11","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-6601-7882","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Jianbo","family":"Qi","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Key Laboratory for Silviculture and Conservation of Ministry of Education, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing 100083, China"},{"name":"Centre d\u2019Etudes Spatiales de la Biosphere, Universit\u00e9 de Toulouse, CNRS, CNES, IRD, UT3, Toulouse 31401, France"},{"name":"Faculty of Geographical Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-2149-6004","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Tiangang","family":"Yin","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20740-3823, USA"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-3923-6056","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Donghui","family":"Xie","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Faculty of Geographical Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-6645-8837","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Jean-Philippe","family":"Gastellu-Etchegorry","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Centre d\u2019Etudes Spatiales de la Biosphere, Universit\u00e9 de Toulouse, CNRS, CNES, IRD, UT3, Toulouse 31401, France"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2019,11,12]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1380","DOI":"10.1109\/36.649788","article-title":"Estimation of global leaf area index and absorbed PAR using radiative transfer models","volume":"35","author":"Myneni","year":"1997","journal-title":"IEEE Trans. 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