Efficient hardware for antialiasing coverage mask generation

An efficient low-cost, low-power hardware implementation of a novel run-time pixel coverage mask generation algorithm for embedded 3D graphics antialiasing purposes is presented. The proposed algorithm can be incorporated in any antialiasing scheme with prefiltering that is based on algebraic representation of primitive´s edges. When compared with the state of the art, the described algorithm reduces several times the size of the required hardware implementation due to the utilization of the quadrant symmetry property allowing the storage of only the coverage mask information for a few representative edges in one of the quadrants of the plane, the rest of the information being derived on the fly via computationally inexpensive operations