[Pixman] [cairo] Supersampling - 2nd attempt
Bill Spitzak
spitzak at gmail.com
Tue Aug 17 09:56:35 PDT 2010
On 08/17/2010 01:01 AM, Soeren Sandmann wrote:
> Bill Spitzak<spitzak at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> > I'm not sure what's
>> > the difference in quality between those approaches. I could try
>> > prototyping both of them.
>>
>> I suspect there is going to be a phasing problem with your approach if
>> the scale is slightly different that 1/integer. At some places the
>> kernel samples line up with the pixel centers and at others it is
>> between them and thus blurring or lowering the contrast. This will
>> probably look like moire patterns.
>
> This is why we need both interpolation and low-pass filtering. When
> the kernel samples don't line up with the pixel centers, then we apply
> the interpolation filter. For example the bilinear filter. For
> example:
>
>
> X X X
>
>
>
> o o o o o o o o o o o
>
> o o o o o o o o o o o
>
> X o o o o Xo o o o o X o
>
> o o o o o o o o o o o
>
>
> Here, the o's represent transformed destination subpixels and the X's
> represent source pixels. If the image has a
>
> pixman_image_set_filter()
>
> of PIXMAN_FILTER_BILINEAR, then for each of the o's a bilinear
> interpolation will take place, and then all those interpolation
> results will be averaged together (or combined in a higher-quality way
> if we add other resampling filters than box).
This is exactly the problem I am describing. A sample that is 1/2 way
between pixels A and B will get the value (A+B)/2. A sample that is
centered on pixel B will get the value B. This will cause moire patterns
because the first sample is from a blurred image and the second is from
a sharp image and the output image will vary between these as the phase
of the samples passes over the image.
Imagine the image is a checkerboard of black and white pixels. The 1/2
way sample will be .5 while the centered sample will be 1 or 0.
The example image of the house shows this clearly by the aliased
frequency banding in the gray stripe at the bottom.
> Another, faster, but lower-quality, type of interpolation is NEAREST,
> in which case each o will just take the value of the closest
> X. Depending on the sample rate, this could indeed produce more
> aliasing artifacts.
Actually nearest could improve the moire patterns but it adds a lot of
noise.
Another way to kill the moire patterns is to make all samples a 50/50
average of two pixels, ie blur the entire image uniformly. This is
somewhat what mipmapping does.
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