Real-time zoom anti-aliasing improvement using programmable graphics processing units

Abstract

The zoom anti-aliasing (ZAA) procedure used for rendering computer-generated targets at long range is examined in the light of its lack of conformality with sampling theory. This has led to the development of a GPU-based conformal version, called Schade ZAA. It is shown that Schade ZAA leads to improvement in intensity errors and significantly less scintillation when the target subtends less than a single pixel in screen space. It is shown further that the intensity errors for the normal type of irregularly-shaped target of most user interest are considerably smaller than has been previously reported. This is a significant result in that it gives confidence that the intensity of small and point source targets can be successfully conserved within the ZAA process.

DRDC's approach to IR scene generation for IRCM simulation

“…Recently, high-performance zoom anti-aliasing (ZAA) algorithms exploiting GPU capabilities such as Schade ZAA 5 and nested ZAA 6 were demonstrated. However, since very long ranges were not a requirement, a simpler ZAA algorithm, although still using the GPU through multi-pass rendering, was implemented.…”

“…It supports many standard 3D model formats including OpenFlight, one of the most widespread formats. Following the demonstrations by several groups [5][6][7] , rendering operations are performed as much as possible by the graphics processing unit (GPU), either by using standard OpenGL commands, or through the use of shaders to program the rendering pipeline for more specific applications. Being natively supported by OSG, and not hardware specific, the OpenGL shading language (GLSL) was chosen.…”