Bresenham's Line Generation Algorithm with Built-in Clipping

Abstract

One of the most important operations in many graphical systems is the generation of a line segment. This process consists of two stages: clipping and drawing. These two stages are separated in current graphical applications. In this paper a new approach to line generation is proposed, which unifies these stages. The proposed algorithm is based on Bresenham s line generation algorithm to include necessary line clipping. The line clipping stage is an operation-reduced, integer arithmetic only algorithm. The notion of correctness of line clipping is introduced and correctness of the proposed algorithm is shown. Complete C-notation of the algorithm is included.