the four-pointer antialiasing method

The four pointer antialiasing method removes staircase artifacts at polygon boundaries in a second render pass.

Today's computer graphic cards have achieved satisfactory performance on texture antialiasing, e.g. by using mip-mapping. Most scene-antialiasing methods, such as super-sampling, however, still require a rendering effort proportional to the desired quality and therefore affect performance. The four-pointer method is a novel scene antialiasing method. For each pixel, the algorithm stores not only the color at the pixel center (point sampling), but also a mask describing how the error caused by point-sampling can be corrected by mixing-in color from neighbored pixels. In a second pass, this additional information is used to remove artifacts from the rendered image. Compared to super-sampling, this method is several times more time and space efficient.