Fast Spheres, Shadows, Textures, Transparencies, and Image Enhancements in Pixel-Planes

Pixel-planes is a logic-enhanced memory system for raster graphics and imaging. Although each pixel-memory is enhanced with a one-bit ALU, the system's real power comes from a tree of one-bit address that can evaluate linear expressions Ax + By + C for every pixel (x,y) simultaneously, as fast as the ALUs and the memory circuits can accept the results. The development of a variety of algorithms that exploit this fast linear expression evaluation capability has started. The paper reports some of those results. Illustrated in this paper is a sample image from a small working prototype of the Pixel- planes hardware and a variety of images from simulations of a full-scale system. Timing estimates indicate that 30,000 smooth shaded triangles can be generated per second, or 21, 000 smooth-shaded and shadowed triangles can be generated per second, or over 25,000 shaded spheres can be generated per second. Image-enhancement by adaptive histogram equalization can be performed within 4 seconds on a 512 x 512 image