A Note on the Time Complexity of Using Subdivision Methods for the Approximation of Fibers

Abstract: Subdivision methods such as quadtrees, octrees, and higher-dimensional orthrees are standard practice in different domains of computer science. We can use these methods to represent given geometries, such as curves, meshes, or surfaces. This representation is achieved by splitting some bounding voxel recursively while further splitting only sub-voxels that intersect with the given geometry. It is fairly known that subdivision methods are more efficient than traversing a fine-grained voxel grid. In this short note, we propose another outlook on analyzing the construction time complexity of orthrees to represent implicitly defined geometries that are fibers (preimages) of some function. This complexity is indeed asymptotically better than traversing dense voxel grids, under certain conditions, which we specify in the note. In fact, the complexity is output sensitive, and is closely related to the Hausdorff measure and Hausdorff dimension of the resulting geometry.