Z-order Curve - Efficiently Building Quadtrees

Efficiently Building Quadtrees

As mentioned, the Z-ordering can be used to efficiently build a quadtree for a set of points. The basic idea is to sort the input set according to Z-order. Once sorted, the points can either be stored in a binary search tree and used directly, which is called a linear quadtree, or they can be used to build a pointer based quadtree.

The input points are usually scaled in each dimension to be positive integers, either as a fixed point representation over the unit range or corresponding to the machine word size. Both representations are equivalent and allow for the highest order non-zero bit to be found in constant time. Each square in the quadtree has a side length which is a power of two, and corner coordinates which are multiples of the side length. Given any two points, the derived square for the two points is the smallest square covering both points. The interleaving of bits from the x and y components of each point is called the shuffle of x and y, and can be extended to higher dimensions.

Points can be sorted according to their shuffle without explicitly interleaving the bits. To do this, for each dimension, the most significant bit of the exclusive or of the coordinates of the two points for that dimension is examined. The dimension for which the most significant bit is largest is then used to compare the two points to determine their shuffle order.

The exclusive or operation masks off the higher order bits for which the two coordinates are identical. Since the shuffle interleaves bits from higher order to lower order, identifying the coordinate with the largest most significant bit, identifies the first bit in the shuffle order which differs, and that coordinate can be used to compare the two points. This is shown in the following Python code:

One way to determine whether the most significant smaller is to compare the floor of the base-2 logarithm of each point. It turns out the following operation is equivalent, and only requires exclusive or operations :

It is also possible to compare floating point numbers using the same technique. The less_msb function is modified to first compare the exponents. Only when they are equal is the standard less_msb function used on the mantissas.

Once the points are in sorted order, two properties make it easy to build a quadtree: The first is that the points contained in a square of the quadtree form a contiguous interval in the sorted order. The second is that if more than one child of a square contains an input point, the square is the derived square for two adjacent points in the sorted order.

For each adjacent pair of points, the derived square is computed and its side length determined. For each derived square, the interval containing it is bounded by the first larger square to the right and to the left in sorted order. Each such interval corresponds to a square in the quadtree. The result of this is a compressed quadtree, where only nodes containing input points or two or more children are present. A non-compressed quadtree can be built by restoring the missing nodes, if desired.

Rather than building a pointer based quadtree, the points can be maintained in sorted order in a data structure such as a binary search tree. This allows points to be added and deleted in O(log n) time. Two quadtrees can be merged by merging the two sorted sets of points, and removing duplicates. Point location can be done by searching for the points preceding and following the query point in the sorted order. If the quadtree is compressed, the predecessor node found may be an arbitrary leaf inside the compressed node of interest. In this case, it is necessary to find the predecessor of the least common ancestor of the query point and the leaf found.