🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug6.205120.8955@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu> smathur@McRCIM.McGill.EDU (Shailendra Mathur) writes:
>Sorry if this is a trivial question, but what does SPLATTING refer to?
>I came across the term in the context of interpolation of images.

As I understand it, splatting is a technique for resampling images.
Imagine each original pixel as a snowball and throw that snowball
at the new image ("splat!").  Each snowball as it hits distributes
its snow (intensity) over a region.  Each new pixel is then incremented
by the contribution of that snowball to that pixel.  Usually, the
distribution is Gaussian, but others have been used.  Once you've
thrown all of the snowballs and added their contributions, you have
a new resampled image.
 
Basically, the idea is to reverse the usual interpolation.  Rather than
computing each new pixel as a function of the old pixels, compute the
relative contribution of each of the old pixels (their splat) to the
new ones and add these together for the new pixels.
 
The algorithm has also been used for volume rendering by allowing
each three-dimensional pixel to splat against a two-dimensional
viewing plane.  (This, if I remember correctly, was the subject of
Lee Westover's doctoral dissertation here at Carolina last year.)
 
I hope this helps.  Perhaps someone else can give a more definitive
explanation.

-- 
Bryan Morse                University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
morse@cs.unc.edu           Department of Computer Science