The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Dec. 21, 1999
Filed:
May. 15, 1996
Walter E Donovan, Milpitas, CA (US);
Micron Technology, Inc., Bosie, ID (US);
Abstract
A method and apparatus for performing post-process antialiasing of polygon edges. According to one aspect of the invention, a method is provided for modifying the color of a pixel in a texture mapped representation of an image generated from a plurality of polygons. According to this method, it is determined that an edge of one of the plurality of polygons intersects a scan line in the texture mapped representation at an intersection point. In addition, the pixel within which this intersection point lies is determined. The color for this pixel is identified by pixel data stored as part of the texture mapped representation. A filter is performed using the texture mapped representation as an input texture map by: 1) determining a texture point in the input texture map that corresponds to the intersection point; 2) performing a filter on texels in the input texture map identified by that texture point to determine a corrected color for the pixel; and 3) altering the pixel data stored as part of the texture mapped representation for the pixel containing the intersection point to indicate the corrected color. According to another aspect of the invention, the filter used in this method is either a linear filter, a bilinear filter, a quadratic filter, or a cubic filter. According to another aspect of the invention, the step of performing the filter is performed using the same hardware used for performing the texture mapping of the texture mapped representation.