Efficient Hardware for Antialiasing Coverage Mask Generation

An efficient low-cost, low-power hardware implementation of a novel run-time pixel coverage mask generation algorithm for embedded 3-D graphics antialiasing purposes is presented. The proposed algorithm can be incorporated in any antialiasing scheme with pre-filtering that is based on algebraic representation of primitive's edges. When compared with the state of the art, the described algorithm reduces several times the size of the required hardware implementation due to the utilization of the quadrant symmetry property allowing the storage of only the coverage mask information for a few representative edges in one of the quadrants of the plane, the rest of the information being derived on the fly via computationally inexpensive operations.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: CGI
• Authors: Dan Crisu, Sorin Cotofana, Stamatis Vassiliadis, Petri Liuha
• Keywords: CGI 2004, Computer Graphics, Coverage Mask, Graphics Antialiasing Purposes, Mask Generation Algorithm