Approximate Line Scan-Conversion and its Hardware Design

This paper presents an approximate multiple segment line scan-conversion method — the Slope Table Method, and analyze the statistics on different properties, advantages, and drawbacks. The statistics show that the new method can increase the percentage of multiple segment lines (i.e., lines with more than one segments) of all possible lines in an N×N raster area from about 39% to more than 99%. In software implementation for line scan-conversion and antialiasing, this method is on average more than 6 times faster than Gupta’s antialiasing line algorithm. Compared with other line scan-conversion methods, the method may choose pixels which are not the closest to the line (i.e., error pixels). Here the paper demonstrates that the visual effect is acceptable in most applications with the error pixels. Finally, the paper provides the hardware implementation design of the Slope Table method for multiple segment line scan-conversion.