Polygon Statistics and Polygon Scan-Conversion and Antialiasing

We present a new method for line drawing, triangle filling, polygon filling, and antialiasing. Current statistics show that our method improves line drawing and antialiasing about 6 times and polygon filling functions significantly over all existing methods. Specifically, it can improve finding the span extrema of polygons about 2 times and drawing the antialiased polygon edges more than 2 times faster than existing methods. The exact overall efficiency of polygon filling and antialiasing is a complex combination of many other factors, which we are unable to provide exact improvement statistics without hardware implementation and test. The idea of our method is completely different from current existing graphics primitive scanconversion (i.e., line drawing, triangle filling, quad filling, and polygon filling in general) algorithms. It is a great extension to our earlier work on line drawing [3, 5]. We save pixel patterns and distances of pixels to lines and edges in a table called SlopeTable. Based on this table, we provide the algorithms to improve the primitive scan-conversions and antialiasing. Improving the efficiency of graphics primitives will significantly advance the whole graphics research and application area.