Parallel image generation with anti-aliasing and texturing
Gregory D. Abram · 1986
This dissertation explores the use of an analytic visibility algorithm for the high-speed generation of anti-aliased images with textures. When visibility is knwon analytically before any sampling takes place, low-pass filtering for anti-aliasing can be done to arbitrary accuracy at a cost proportionate to the output resolution. Furthermore, since the filtering and sampling processes can be expressed as a set of integrations over the image plane, the filtering process can be decomposed into a set of sums of integrations over each visible surface in the image plane, allowing the rendering of each visible surface to be done in parallel using an image buffer to accumulate the results. Thus, analytic visibility can serve as the basis for high-speed, high-quality image synthesis. In this dissertation, algorithms for computing analytic visibility and for producing filtered renderings from the resulting visible surfaces are presented. In order to provide real-time performance, these algorithms have been designed for parallel execution on simple concurrent structures. Architectures based on these algorithms are presented and simulated to produce expected execution times on a set of test images.