Scan conversion of lines and Polygons

Scan conversion refers to the calculation of the pixels that best approximate a geometric shape. The applets here attempt to ilustrate the workings of several algorithms for scan conversion.

Drawing Lines

The DDA (Digital Differential Analyzer) algorithm just uses the equation of the line.

Bresenham's algorithm is a more efficient way of drawing lines.

Filling polygons

The simplest way to fill a polygon is to just look at each pixel on the screen and calculate whether it is inside or outside the polygon.

The scanline algorithm is a much more efficient way of filling polygons.


All these applets are subclasses of BigPixelApplet which contains all the code they share. They all use BigPixelCanvas which displays very big pixels so you can see what is going on.

You can browse all the Java source here.


Tim Lambert
Last modified: Thu Jan 20 02:46:51 EST 2000