Bixels: Picture Samples with Sharp Embedded Boundaries

Pixels store a digital image as a grid of point samples that can reconstruct a limited-bandwidth continuous 2-D source image. Although convenient for anti-aliased display, these bandwidth limits irreversibly discard important visual boundary information that is difficult or impossible to accurately recover from pixels alone. We propose bixels instead: they also store a digital image as a grid of point samples, but each sample keeps 8 extra bits to set embedded geometric boundaries that are infinitely sharp, more accurately placed, and directly machine-readable. Bixels represent images as piecewise-continuous, with discontinuous intensities and gradients at boundaries that form planar graphs. They reversibly combine vector and raster image features, decouple boundary sharpness from the number of samples used to store them, and do not mix unrelated but adjacent image contents, e.g blue sky and green leaf. Bixels are meant to be compatible with pixels. A bixel is a image sample point w...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: RT
• Authors: Jack Tumblin, Prasun Choudhury
• Keywords: Digital Image, Image, Point Samples, RT 2004