Improving Filtering for Computer Graphics
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Date
2014-04-30
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Abstract
When drawing images onto a computer screen, the information in the scene is typically
more detailed than can be displayed. Most objects, however, will not be close to the
camera, so details have to be filtered out, or anti-aliased, when the objects are drawn on
the screen. I describe new methods for filtering images and shapes with high fidelity while
using computational resources as efficiently as possible.
Vector graphics are everywhere, from drawing 3D polygons to 2D text and maps for
navigation software. Because of its numerous applications, having a fast, high-quality
rasterizer is important. I developed a method for analytically rasterizing shapes using
wavelets. This approach allows me to produce accurate 2D rasterizations of images and
3D voxelizations of objects, which is the first step in 3D printing. I later improved my
method to handle more filters. The resulting algorithm creates higher-quality images than
commercial software such as Adobe Acrobat and is several times faster than the most
highly optimized commercial products.
The quality of texture filtering also has a dramatic impact on the quality of a rendered
image. Textures are images that are applied to 3D surfaces, which typically cannot be
mapped to the 2D space of an image without introducing distortions. For situations in
which it is impossible to change the rendering pipeline, I developed a method for precomputing
image filters over 3D surfaces. If I can also change the pipeline, I show that it
is possible to improve the quality of texture sampling significantly in real-time rendering
while using the same memory bandwidth as used in traditional methods.
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Keywords
filtering, texture mapping, mipmap, rasterization, wavelets, surface reconstruction