Anti-Aliased Line Drawing on a Distributed Cell Store System

Abstract

One of the principle drawbacks with traditional parallel image composition architectures is the lack of support for transparent images. This paper introduces the Distributed Cell Store System, an architecture based on image composition principles, but which provides explicit support for transparency via its Serial Bus System. The transparency support is exploited ina scheme for the generation of smooth-edged lines,which avoids the need for any anti-aliasing calculation in software. The benefits of segmenting lines so that different segments may be rendered in parallel in different processing units are identified and quantified, and the paper concludes with a discussion on the benefits for incremental image specification systems which could be gained from implementation on such a hardware platform."