An efficient low-cost antialiasing method based on adaptive postfiltering

Aliasing in computer-synthesized images not only limits the realism of the images, but also affects the user's concentration. Many antialiasing methods have been proposed to solve this problem, but almost all of them are computation intensive, and some of them are also memory intensive. While these may not be limitations for high-end applications such as medical visualization and architectural design, this kind of antialiasing methods may still be far too costly for the low-cost applications. In this paper, we propose an antialiasing method that operates in the image domain. It is based on fitting curves to the discontinuity edges extracted from the aliased images to reshade those edge pixels. (Note that a curve may be considered as a general form of lines.) To improve the performance and the simplicity of the method, we propose to preprocess all possible edge patterns and fit curves in advance. During runtime, we only need to construct an index to obtain the filtering information from a lookup table. The new method is extremely simple and efficient. It provides a very good compromise between hardware cost and output image quality. In addition, because the new method has a very low computational cost, and hence low power consumption for hardware implementation, it is particularly suitable for low-cost mobile applications such as computer game consoles and palm computers, where low implementation cost and low power consumption are important design factors.