CSE168, Computer Graphics II: Rendering Texture Filtering and Mip-Mapping

If we render textures using bi-linear interpolation we will observe aliasing artifacts in ray-traced images. Intuitively, we can avoid such problems by averaging the texture over the area of a pixel instead of evaluating it at a single point. To implement such a procedure we have to solve two problems: First, we need to compute the region in the texture that corresponds to the pixel area. We call this region the pixel footprint. We describe pixel footprint computation in Section 2. Second, we need a fast procedure to obtain the average of the texture over this area. This can be achieved using mip-mapping and trilinear interpolation, which is described in Section 3.