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Item Cellular Architectures and Algorithmsfor Image Synthesis(The Eurographics Association, 1987) Meriaux, Michel; Fons Kuijk and Wolfgang StrasserThe aim of this paper is to provide some refiexions and partial results about cellular architectures for image synthesis and graphics. As some steps of image synthesis involve a long processing time, quite incompatible with interactivity, a natural solution consists in parallel processing. Though a lot of work has been done about cellular hardware, only a little exists about cellular graphic algorithms and hardware.Item I.M.O.G.E.N.E.-A Solution to the Real Time Animation Problem(The Eurographics Association, 1990) Chaillou, Christophe; Meriaux, Michel; Karpf, Sylvain; Richard Grimsdale and Arie KaufmanCurrent graphics processors are very slow for displaying shaded 3D objects. A lot of work is being done in order to define faster display processors by using massive parallelism and VLSI components. Our proposal goes along this line with the supplemen tary aim of displaying images in real time, i.e., 25 or 30 times per second. We choose to design a graphics module without any working memory and thus without frame buffer. A massive parallelism over objects, and thus a pixel pipe-line, are used. Each Object Pro cessor handles one 3D object; all the processors work in a synchronous way, processing the same pixel simultaneously at pixel rate. These processors are built from very simple Elementary Processors (2 adders, 2 registers and 6 memory words) computing linear or quadratic expressions V(x,y), where (x,y) are the coordinates of a pixeL A pipelined tree made of basic operators (min, max, or, and, ... ) gathers the results given by the Ob ject Processors and makes inter-objects operations, at least hidden part elimination. Such a choice of course involves a high hardware complexity when displaying rather sim ple scenes. However, we feel that it is the price to pay for building graphics processors allowing real-time interactive animation (e.g., the graphics unit of a driving simulator).Item A Cellular Architecture for Ray Tracing(The Eurographics Association, 1990) Atamenia, Abdelghani; Meriaux, Michel; Lepretre, Eric; Degrande, Samuel; Vidal, Bruno; Richard Grimsdale and Arie Kaufman"We propose in this paper a massively parallel machine dedicated to image synthesis by discrete ray tracing techniques. This machine is a four-stage pipeline, the last stage being a bidimensional cellular array with one cell per pixel. Two main phases describe its behaviour: Loading into the cellular array of the objects of the scene to be displayed, after having been transformed into sets of planar polygons, and then into voxels. Cellular ray tracing over the fully distributed scene.The first phase allows us to see this machine as a massively parallel (not realistic) rendering unit: at the end of the loading phase: objects are fully identified pixel per pixel in the cellular array. Then, we have only to display the computed visual features (by means of Gouraud or Phong-like incremental methods during the loading phase).The second phase increases the image quality by executing the ray tracing algorithm in a very special way, i.e., completely distributed all over the many cells of the array. In that phase, objects are seen as split into voxels into a virtual 3D memory space. The machine is an attempt to bring a dramatic answer to the problem of performance, taking into account not only the computational power required for image synthesis by using a massive parallelism, but also the realization costs by using very regular structures, which make it a VLS1-oriented architecture."