Abstract

As the complexity of object models used in image synthesis increases, the image distortions caused by aliasing are exacerbated. Since methods for eliminating aliasing artifacts from synthetic images involve a filtering operation, the subjective clarity of the images is reduced. Thus it is often assumed that antialiasing destroys useful visual information about object features. We challenge this assumption in three experiments that examine the effects of antialiasing on the visual information for object location and motion. Taken together, the results of these experiments show that proper antialiasing eliminates the spurious visual information produced by sampling processes in image synthesis and allows the viewer's visual system to produce a precise representation of object location and a continuous representation of object motion. These results suggest that in designing imaging systems simply increasing the spatial and temporal addressability and resolution beyond limits set by the human visual system will have a negligible impact on image quality, but that effective use of antialiasing techniques can allow visual information about object features to be presented with great fidelity.