Morphological antialiasing (MLAA) is a spatial anti-aliasing technique used in real-time computer graphics. It reduces artifacts, such as jaggies, when representing a high-resolution image at a lower resolution.
MLAA is a post-process filtering which detects borders in the resulting image and then finds specific patterns in these. Anti-aliasing is achieved by blending pixels in these borders, according to the pattern they belong to and their position within the pattern.123
Introduced in 2009, MLAA was an early and influential example of anti-aliasing techniques done in post-processing, which makes them suitable for deferred shading. A similar method in this class is fast approximate anti-aliasing (FXAA).4 Temporal anti-aliasing, also a post-process, has become the most common anti-aliasing method for real-time rendering and video games.5
Enhanced subpixel morphological antialiasing, or SMAA, is an image-based GPU-based implementation of MLAA6 developed by Universidad de Zaragoza and Crytek.7
References
References
- "MLAA: Efficiently Moving Antialiasing from the GPU to the CPU" (PDF). Intel. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2021-02-25. Retrieved 2018-12-02.
- "MORPHOLOGICAL ANTIALIASING AND TOPOLOGICAL RECONSTRUCTION" (PDF). Institut d'électronique et d'informatique Gaspard-Monge (IGM). Retrieved 2018-12-02.
- "Digital Foundry: The Future of Anti-Aliasing". Eurogamer. 2011-07-16. Retrieved 2018-12-02.
- Jimenez, Jorge; Gutierrez, Diego; Yang, Jason; et al. (2011-08-07). "Filtering approaches for real-time anti-aliasing" (PDF). ACM SIGGRAPH Courses 2011. ACM: 1–329. doi:10.1145/2037636.2037642. ISBN 978-1-4503-0967-7.
- Yang, Lei; Liu, Shiqiu; Salvi, Marco (2020-06-13). "A Survey of Temporal Antialiasing Techniques" (PDF). Computer Graphics Forum. 39 (2): 607–621. doi:10.1111/cgf.14018. ISSN 0167-7055. S2CID 220514131 – via Wiley.
- "iryoku/smaa: SMAA is a very efficient GPU-based MLAA implementation". GitHub. Retrieved 2018-12-13.
- Jorge Jimenez and Jose I. Echevarria and Tiago Sousa and Diego Gutierrez (2012). "SMAA: Enhanced Subpixel Morphological Antialiasing". Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. EUROGRAPHICS 2012). 31 (2). JIMENEZ2012_CGF. Retrieved 2018-12-13.