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Raster Display of a Rotating Object Using Parallel Processing
Author(s) -
Strothotte T.,
Funt B.
Publication year - 1983
Publication title -
computer graphics forum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.578
H-Index - 120
eISSN - 1467-8659
pISSN - 0167-7055
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8659.1983.tb00148.x
Subject(s) - raster graphics , computer science , intersection (aeronautics) , computer graphics (images) , graphics , object (grammar) , surface (topology) , raster scan , line (geometry) , computer vision , artificial intelligence , geometry , mathematics , engineering , aerospace engineering
Parallel processing algorithms have been developed which approach real‐time in displaying raster graphics images of a single rotating three‐dimensional object. The hardware required consists of a large number of individual processors with inter‐processor communication restricted to immediate neighbours. The overall structure is as if the processors were spread uniformly over the surface of a sphere. The objects for display are modelled as if they were inside this sphere of processors. Each processor stores the following information:1) the intersection points of the object's surface with a radial line extended from the sphere's centre along with the surface normals at those intersection points, and 2) pixels representing a small section of the screen.The algorithm involves an organised message‐passing scheme to accomplish rotations of the object description and the subsequent display of the image. A simulation of a system involving several hundred processors indicates that its performance improves as a near‐linear function of the number of processors.