A Real-time Systolic Algorithm for On-the--y Hidden Surface Removal

Hidden surface removal for real-time realistic display of complex scenes requires intensive computation and justiies usage of parallelism to provide the needed response time. We present a systolic algorithm that identiies visible segments on a scanline with the \real-time" characteristic: visible segments are output on-they as soon as segments are input to the systolic array. The proposed systolic architecture consists of a linear array of simple cells. The size of the systolic array is equal to the maximum number of input segments that are crossed by a vertical line. The correctness of the systolic algorithm is proven by rst establishing the correctness of an initial version, which is then successively transformed to more eecient versions, while preserving the properties for correctness.