A sparse voxel octree (SVO) is a 3D computer graphics rendering technique using a raycasting or sometimes a ray tracing approach into an octree data representation.
The basic advantage of octrees is that, as a hierarchical data structure, they need not be explored to their full depth.
This means that a system can extract a small subset of voxels as they are needed.
In addition, octrees permit smoothing of the underlying data, to help with antialiasing.
It is, however, a generally less well developed technique than standard polygon-based rasterisation schemes.