Analytic Antialiasing for Selective High Fidelity Rendering

Abstract

Images rendered using global illumination algorithms are considered amongst the most realistic in 3D computer graphics. However, this high fidelity comes at a significant computational expense. A major part of this cost arises from the sampling required to eliminate aliasing errors. These errors occur due to the discrete sampling of continuous geometry space inherent to these techniques. In this paper we present a fast analytic method for predicting in advance where antialiasing needs to be computed. This prediction is based on a rapid visualisation of the scene using a GPU, which is used to drive a selective renderer. We are able to significantly reduce the overall number of anitialiasing rays traced, producing an image that is perceptually indistinguishable from the high quality image at a much reduced computational cost.

Anti-Aliased DDA

“…In this section a hardware implementation using FPGA of the proposed antialiasing method is presented. A block diagram of the hardware designed unit is illustrated in figure (6). The line pixel calculation part is responsible for the scan conversion operation of a line segment defined by its two input vertices V1(X1,Y1) and V2(X2,Y2).…”

“…Smooth straight lines appear stair like lines when displayed for variety of reasons, the most common being that the output device ( display monitor ) does not have enough resolution to portray a smooth line as mentioned above. This means that sampling is done below the Nyquist rate ( under sampling ) [ 4,5,6].…”

“…These data points are then combined or averaged (down sampling) to the desired resolution. This technique is refer to as post-filtering the image [6,11,12,13,14,15]. The third method of antialiasing treats each pixel as a finite area rather than a point and is known as pre-filtering the image [14,16,17].…”

Cost prediction for global illumination using a fast rasterised scene preview

“…By altering the parameters used for rendering the objects and materials, the Snapshot system can be used for a variety of tasks such as saliency map, task map [17] and anti-aliasing map generation [12].…”

Perceptual graphic rendering and quality evaluation

“…Longhurst et al [76,77,78] Hasic et al [40] conducted psychophysical experiments to investigate the perception of high-saliency movement of objects in a dynamic scene. The experimental results show that the rendering cost can be decreased when motion is introduced to static objects, without any perceptual loss of quality.…”