Fast Floating Point Line Scan-Conversion and Antialiasing

We present a new method for scan-converting a straight line with antialiasing. A scan-converted straight line may contain many pixel segments of identical shapes. Therefore, instead of scanconverting the whole line step by step, we can scan-convert multiple segments of a line through copying and replicating. We discovered that through shifting and copying we can quickly achieve antialiasing. With a few modifications to the existing algorithms, we can significantly speed up the scan-conversion and antialiasing process. Furthermore, our algorithm will not require any of the two end points of the line on the raster grid, and will achieve fast high resolution floating point line (i.e., real line, or line with floating point end points) scan-conversion with antialiasing. This has very important and practical applications in current graphics, because most of the animations and drawings are in 3D and their projections in 2D are mostly in float. We prove that theoretically we can speed up all existing line scan-conversion and antialiasing algorithms on the average 3 times. In software simulation our result shows that on the average our new antialiasing algorithm is at least 1.5 times faster than existing algorithms.