Spatial Anti-aliasing - Examples

Examples

In computer graphics, anti aliasing improves the appearance of polygon edges, so they are not "jagged" but are smoothed out on the screen. However, it incurs a performance cost for the graphics card and uses more video memory. The level of anti-aliasing determines how smooth polygon edges are (and how much video memory it consumes).

Figure 1-a illustrates the visual distortion that occurs when anti-aliasing is not used. Near the top of the image, where the checkerboard is very small, the image is both difficult to recognize and not aesthetically appealing. In contrast, Figure 1-b shows an anti-aliased version of the scene. The checkerboard near the top blends into gray, which is usually the desired effect when the resolution is insufficient to show the detail. Even near the bottom of the image, the edges appear much smoother in the anti-aliased image. Figure 1-c shows another anti-aliasing algorithm, based on the sinc filter, which is considered better than the algorithm used in 1-b.

Figure 2 shows magnified portions (interpolated using the nearest neighbor algorithm) of Figure 1-a (left) and 1-c (right) for comparison. In Figure 1-c, anti-aliasing has interpolated the brightness of the pixels at the boundaries to produce gray pixels since the space is occupied by both black and white tiles. These help make Figure 1-c appear much smoother than Figure 1-a at the original magnification.

In Figure 3, anti-aliasing was used to blend the boundary pixels of a sample graphic; this reduced the aesthetically jarring effect of the sharp, step-like boundaries that appear in the aliased graphic at the left. Anti-aliasing is often applied in rendering text on a computer screen, to suggest smooth contours that better emulate the appearance of text produced by conventional ink-and-paper printing.

Particularly with fonts displayed on typical LCD screens, it is common to use subpixel rendering techniques like ClearType. Subpixel rendering requires special color-balanced anti-aliasing filters to turn what would be severe color distortion into barely-noticeable color fringes. Equivalent results can be had by making individual subpixels addressable as if they were full pixels, and supplying a hardware-based anti-aliasing filter as is done in the OLPC XO-1 laptop's display controller. Pixel geometry affects all of this, whether the anti-aliasing and subpixel addressing are done in software or hardware.