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Alpha Distribution for Alpha Testing

Published: 25 July 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Alpha testing is widely used for rendering surfaces with transparency. While it works well when transparency is a binary function, semi-transparent regions cause problems, as they are classified as either fully transparent or opaque. Unfortunately, semi-transparent texture regions often appear in coarser mipmap levels, causing surfaces to disappear with distance. We introduce the alpha distribution approach for pre-processing the alpha values of a texture such that alpha testing produces expected results with semi-transparency without any modification to render-time operations. We describe two separate algorithms for alpha distribution with similar qualitative behavior. Our results show that alpha distribution can produce high-quality results with low noise. We also explain how alpha distribution can be extended for high-quality rendering with alpha-to-coverage.

References

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Ignacio Castaño. 2010. Computing Alpha Mipmaps. http://the-witness.net/news/2010/09/computing-alpha-mipmaps/.
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Eric Enderton, Erik Sintorn, Peter Shirley, and David Luebke. 2010. Stochastic Transparency. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games. 157--164.
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Cass Everitt. 2001. Interactive Order-Independent Transparency. while paper. NVIDIA.
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Robert W. Floyd and Louis Steinberg. 1976. An Adaptive Algorithm for Spatial Greyscale. Proceedings of the Society for Information Display 17, 2 (1976), 75--77.
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Jurriaan D. Mulder, Frans C. A. Groen, and Jarke J. van Wijk. 1998. Pixel Masks for Screen-door Transparency. In Proceedings of the Conference on Visualization '98 (VIS '98). IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, USA, 351--358.
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Victor Ostromoukhov. 2001. A Simple and Efficient Error-diffusion Algorithm. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH '01). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 567--572.
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Chris Wyman. 2016. Exploring and Expanding the Continuum of OIT Algorithms. In Eurographics/ ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on High Performance Graphics, Ulf Assarsson and Warren Hunt (Eds.).
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  1. Alpha Distribution for Alpha Testing

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    cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques
    Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques  Volume 1, Issue 1
    July 2018
    378 pages
    EISSN:2577-6193
    DOI:10.1145/3242771
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 25 July 2018
    Published in PACMCGIT Volume 1, Issue 1

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    Author Tags

    1. alpha map
    2. alpha test
    3. error diffusion

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