Sampling, Aliasing. Examples of Aliasing What is a Pixel? A pixel is not: –a box –a disk –a...
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Transcript of Sampling, Aliasing. Examples of Aliasing What is a Pixel? A pixel is not: –a box –a disk –a...
Sampling, Aliasing
Examples of Aliasing
What is a Pixel?• A pixel is not:
– a box– a disk– a tiny little light
• A pixel “looks different” ondifferent display devices
• A pixel is a sample– it has no dimension– it occupies no area– it cannot be seen– it has a coordinate– it has a value
Philosophical perspective
• The physical world is continuous, inside the computer things need to be discrete
• Lots of computer graphics is about translating continuous problems into discrete solutions – e.g. ODEs for physically-based animation, global
illumination, meshes to represent smooth surfaces, antialiasing
• Careful mathematical understanding helps do the right thing
More on Samples• The process of mapping a continuous function to a discrete one
is called sampling
• The process of mapping a continuous variable to a discrete one is called quantization
• To represent or render an image using a computer, we must both sample and quantize – Focus on the effects of sampling and how to overcome them
discrete position
discretevalue
Sampling & reconstructionThe visual array of light is a continuous function1/ we sample it
– with a digital camera, or with a ray tracer– This gives us a finite set of numbers,
not really something we can see– We are now inside the discrete computer world
2/ we need to get this back to the physical world: we reconstruct a continuous function– for example, the point spread of a pixel on a CRT or LCD
• Both steps can create problems– But we’ll focus on the first one (you are not display
manufacturers)
Examples of Aliasing
Examples of Aliasing
Examples of Aliasing
Texture Errors
point sampling
Sampling Density
• If we’re lucky, sampling density is enough
Input Reconstructed
Sampling Density
• If we insufficiently sample the signal, it may be mistaken for something simpler during reconstruction (that's aliasing!)
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Aliasing insufficient sampling (sampling rate is too small)
• Aliasing: a high-frequency signal masquerading as a low frequency
SamplingInterval
Actual (high-frequency) signal
Sampled (aliased) signal
Discussion
• Two types of aliasing– Edges– Repetitive textures
• More tricky• Harder to solve
Solution?
• How do we avoid the high-frequency patterns distort our image?
• We blur!– For ray tracing: compute at higher resolution, blur,
resample at lower resolution– For textures, we can also blur the texture image
before doing the lookup
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Aliasing and Line Drawing
• We draw lines by sampling at intervals of one pixel and drawing the closest pixels
SamplingInterval
SamplingInterval
• Results in stair-stepping
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Anti-aliasing Lines
• Idea:– Make line thicker– Fade line out (removes high frequencies)– Now sample the line
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Anti-aliasing Lines
Solution – Unweighted Area Sampling:– Treat line as a single-pixel wide rectangle
– Colour pixels according to the percentage of each pixel covered by the rectangle.
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Solution : Unweighted Area Sampling
• Pixel area is unit square• Constant weighting function • Pixel colour is determined by computing the amount of
the pixel covered by the line, then shading accordingly• Easy to compute, gives reasonable results
Line
One Pixel
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Solution : Weighted Area Sampling
Treat pixel area as a circle with a radius of one pixel Use a radially symmetric weighting function (e.g., cone):
– Areas closer to the pixel centre are weighted more heavily
Better results than unweighted, slightly higher cost
Line
One Pixel
Re-hashing
• Your intuitive solution is to compute multiple colour values per pixel and average them
• A better interpretation of the same idea is that– You first create a higher resolution image– You blur it (average)– You resample it at a lower resolution
Sampling Theorem
• When sampling a signal at discrete intervals, the sampling frequency must be greater than twice the highest frequency of the input signal in order to be able to reconstruct the original perfectly from the sampled version (Shannon, Nyquist, Whittaker, Kotelnikov)
Filters (convolution kernel)• Weighting function
• Area of influence often bigger than "pixel"
• Sum of weights = 1– Each sample contributes
the same total to image
– Constant brightness as object moves across the screen.
• No negative weights
Filters
• Filters are used to – reconstruct a continuous signal from a sampled signal
(reconstruction filters)– band-limit continuous signals to avoid aliasing during
sampling (low-pass filters)
• Desired frequency domain properties are the same for both types of filters
• Often, the same filters are used as reconstruction and low-pass filters
Pre-Filtering• Filter continuous primitives
• Treat a pixel as an area
• Compute weighted amount of object overlap
• What weighting function should we use?
Post-Filtering
• Filter samples• Compute the weighted average of many samples• Regular or jittered sampling (better)
The Ideal Filter• Unfortunately it has
infinite spatial extent– Every sample contributes
to every interpolated point
• Expensive/impossible to compute spatial
frequency
Problems with Practical Filters
• Many visible artifacts in re-sampled images are caused by poor reconstruction filters
• Excessive pass-band attenuation results in blurry images
• Excessive high-frequency leakage causes "ringing" and can accentuate the sampling grid (anisotropy)
frequency
Gaussian Filter
• This is what a CRTdoes for free!
spatial
frequency
Box Filter / Nearest Neighbour
• Pretending pixelsare little squares.
spatial
frequency
Tent Filter / Bi-Linear Interpolation
• Simple to implement• Reasonably smooth
spatial
frequency
Bi-Cubic Interpolation• Begins to approximate
the ideal spatial filter, the sinc function
spatial
frequency
Ideal sampling/reconstruction
• Pre-filter with a perfect low-pass filter– Box in frequency– Sinc in time
• Sample at Nyquist limit– Twice the frequency cutoff
• Reconstruct with perfect filter– Box in frequency, sinc in time
• And everything is great!
Difficulties with perfect sampling
• Hard to prefilter• Perfect filter has infinite support
– Fourier analysis assumes infinite signal and complete knowledge
– Not enough focus on local effects
• And negative lobes– Emphasizes the two problems above– Negative light is bad– Ringing artifacts if prefiltering or supports are not
perfect
Supersampling in graphics
• Pre-filtering is hard– Requires analytical visibility– Then difficult to integrate
analytically with filter
• Possible for lines, or if visibility is ignored
• usually, fall back to supersampling
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Solution: Super-sampling
• Divide pixel up into “sub-pixels”: 22, 33, 44, etc.
• Sub-pixel is coloured if inside line• Pixel colour is the average of its sub-pixel colours• Easy to implement (in software and hardware)
No anti-aliasing Anti-aliasing (22 super-sampling)
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Many Types of Supersampling
GridRandom
Poisson Disc Jittered
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Polygon Anti-aliasing• To anti-alias a line, we treat it as a rectangle• Anti-aliasing a polygon is similar.• Some concerns:
– Micro-polygons: smaller than a
pixel
– Super-sampling: There may still be polygons that “slip between the cracks”
Uniform supersampling
• Compute image at resolution k*width, k*height• Downsample using low-pass filter
(e.g. Gaussian, sinc, bicubic)
Uniform supersampling• Advantage:
– The first (super)sampling captures more high frequencies that are not aliased
• Issues– Frequencies above the (super)sampling limit are still
aliased
• Works well for edges• Not as well for repetitive textures
Jittering
• Uniform sample + random perturbation• Sampling is now non-uniform• Signal processing gets more complex• In practice, adds noise to image• But noise is better than aliasing Moiré patterns
Jittered supersampling
• Regular, Jittered Supersampling
Jittering
• Displaced by a vector a fraction of the size of the subpixel distance
• Low-frequency Moire (aliasing) pattern replaced by noise
• Extremely effective• Patented by Pixar!
Reconsider Uniform supersampling
• Problem: supersampling only pushes the problem further: The signal is still not bandlimited
• Aliasing still happens
• We need a better solution for high frequency sections of the image
Adaptive sampling• Adjust your sampling rate and/or bucket size on-the-fly,
depending on results of previous samples
– attempt to concentrate more samples in high frequency areas (e.g., edges of objects) and fewer samples in low frequency areas (constant regions)
– get an approximate view of the function by first sampling with a low sampling rate and/or large bucket size over the entire domain
– then use that approximation to estimate where more samples should be taken by focusing on regions of high variance
– generally a recursive process
• Much better than naïve supersampling
Adaptive supersampling
• Use more sub-pixel samples around edges
Adaptive supersampling
• Use more sub-pixel samples around edgesCompute colour at small number of sample
If variance with neighbour pixels is high
Compute larger number of samples
Adaptive supersampling
• Use more sub-pixel samples around edgesCompute colour at small number of sample
If variance with neighbour pixels is high
Compute larger number of samples