%0 Report %D 2010 %T Design, Analysis and Comparison of Spatial Indexes for Tetrahedral Meshes %A De Floriani, Leila %A Fellegara,R. %A Magillo,P. %X We address the problem of performing spatial queries on tetrahedral meshes. These latterarise in several application domains including 3D GIS, scientific visualization, finite element analysis. We have defined and implemented a family of spatial indexes, that we call tetrahedral trees. Tetrahedral trees are based on a subdivision of a cubic domain containing the mesh defined either by an octree or a 3D kd-tree. For each of them, we have four variants of the spatial index, depending on four different subdivision criteria. Here, we present such indexes, we discuss how to construct them and perform classical spatial queries such as point location and window queries. We compare the various tetrahedral trees based in memory usage, performances in spatial queries and computation times for constructing them. %I Department of Computer Science and Information Science, University of Genoa %V DISI-TR-2010-05 %8 2010/// %G eng