what are the advantages of octrees in spatial/temporal performance or otherwise, and in what situations are they most applicable (I've heard 3D graphics programming)?
k-D trees are balanced binary trees and octrees are tries so the advantages and disadvantages are probably inherited from those more general data structures. Specifically:
- Rebalancing can be expensive (octrees don't need rebalancing).
- Balancing handles heterogeneity better because it is adaptive.
- Higher branching factor in octrees means shallower trees (fewer indirections and allocations) for homogeneous distributions.
Also, bisection (as in octrees) lends itself to trivial implementation in terms of bit-twiddling. Similarly, I imagine octrees can benefit greatly from precomputed distances when doing range lookups.
EDIT
Apparently my references to tries and homogeneity need clarification.
Tries are a family of data structures represented by trees of dictionaries and are used as dictionaries for keys that are sequences (most notably strings but also DNA sequences and the bits in a hash value for hash tries). If each dictionary maps one bit of each of x, y and z coordinates (most significant bit in the first level of the trie, next significant bit in the second level etc.) then the trie is an octree that uniformly subdivides 3D space. Hence octrees inherit the characteristics of tries which are, in general:
- High branching factor can mean shallow trees that incur few indirections so searching is fast, e.g. 20 levels of binary tree can be stored in 4 levels of a tree with a branching factor of 256.
- Tries don't get rebalanced during insertions and deletions, saving an expensive operation required for balanced binary trees.
The disadvantage is that heterogeneity can result in imbalanced tries/octrees so searches can require many indirections. The equivalent problem in tries is solved using edge compression to collapse multiple levels of indirection into a single level. Octrees don't do this but there is nothing to stop you from compressing an octree (but I don't think you could call the result an octree!).
For comparison, consider a specialized dictionary for string keys that is represented as a trie. The first level of the trie branches on the first character in the key. The second level on the second character and so on. Any string can be looked up by searching for the first character from the key in the dictionary to obtain a second dictionary that is used to lookup the second character from the key and so on. A set of random key strings would be a homogeneous distribution. A set of key strings that all share some prefix (e.g. all words beginning with "anti") are a heterogeneous distribution. In the latter case, the first dictionary contains only one binding, for "a", the second only one for "n" and so on. Searching for any mapping in the trie always being by searching the same four dictionaries with the same four keys. This is inefficient and this is what octrees do if, for example, they are used to store heterogeneous particle distributions where the vast majority of particles lie in a tiny volume within the vector space.