Introduction to Area-Based Anti-Aliasing for CGI

Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) consists of computer applications for creating images in art, video games and 3D animation. These images consist of 2 dimensional arrays of pixels (picture elements), such as 1kx1k pixels for example. When images are computed using a single sample per pixel, they show aliasing artifacts such as stairsteps on feature edges (jaggies). Aliasing artifacts can be minimized by applying Anti-Aliasing (AA) techniques, such as Multi-Sample AA (MSAA). With MSAA, several images are computed for a few sample points per pixel, followed by images averaging. MSAA is computation intensive, slow, costly and with mixed results.

The author has developed a new approach to AA, Area-Based AA (ABAA), that is vastly superior to MSAA. ABAA relies on subpixel area-sampling instead of point-sampling. It produces better quality images. It is also much faster, simpler, low-power and low-cost. With all these advantages, ABAA should be widely accepted for future 3D CGI implementations.

This book has three versions and this is the introductory version.