Abstract: We present a compact representation for the bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) of freeform NURBS surfaces using Coons patches. Following the Coons construction, each subpatch can be bounded very efficiently using the bilinear surface determined by the four corners. The BVH of freeform surfaces is represented as a hierarchy of Coons patch approximation until the difference is reduced to within a given error bound. Each leaf node contains a single Coons patch, where a detailed BVH for the patch can be represented very compactly using two lists (containing curve approximation errors) of length proportional only to the height of the BVH. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our compact BVH representation using several experimental results from real-time applications in collision detection and minimum distance computation for freeform models.