Human vision, anti-aliasing, and the cheap 4000 line display

Abstract

Despite its other advantages, one of the major objections to raster graphics has been the poor image quality and aliasing effects caused by discrete sampling. These effects include “jaggies” or stair-stepping, crawling, line breakup, and scintillation. Several solutions have been proposed in the literature, however, most suffer severe drawbacks and are only partially successful at eliminating aliasing effects. One solution, area anti-aliasing, is not only effective, it produces results comparable to higher resolution systems. Using widely available data on human visual response, it is shown how this technique actually increases the perceived resolution of a display beyond the hardware resolution by factors of up to 16X. The requirements of such a system are discussed, as well as some of the problems encountered.