Image anti-aliasing techniques for Internet visual media processing: a review

Anti-aliasing is a well-established technique in computer graphics that reduces the blocky or stair-wise appearance of pixels. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the anti-aliasing techniques used in computer graphics, which can be classified into two categories: post-filtering based anti-aliasing and pre-filtering based anti-aliasing. We discuss post-filtering based anti-aliasing algorithms through classifying them into hardware anti-aliasing techniques and post-process techniques for deferred rendering. Comparisons are made among different methods to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of every category. We also review the utilization of anti-aliasing techniques from the first category in different graphic processing units, i.e., different NVIDIA and AMD series. This review provides a guide that should allow researchers to position their work in this important research area, and new research problems are identified.