Compositing

While FvD has some discussion of compositing, it is such an important topic that you should probably learn more about it.The Smith reference below is required reading for the class. Everything else is optional.

The original source of information on compositing was a paper by Porter and Duff in SIGGRAPH '94

Compositing Digital Images. T. Porter, T. Duff. Compositing Digital Images, Computer Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH), 18:3, pp. 253-259, 1984.

Unfortunately, this is not available on-line. Last year, I had made this a required reading, but I made copies available.

Alvy Ray Smith, who was instrumental in the creation of these methods wrote an excellent tutorial on implementing compositing. This reading is REQUIRED for 559. Don't worry about the details of making it go fast avoiding integer arithmetic.

Image Compositing Fundamentals, Alvy Ray Smith, Tech Memo 4, Aug 15, 1995

For an interesting discussion of the history of this, I HIGHLY recommend:

Alpha and the History of Digital Compositing. Alvy Ray Smith, Tech Memo 7, Aug 15, 1995.

A Pixel Is Not A Little Square, A Pixel Is Not A Little Square, A Pixel Is Not A Little Square! (And a Voxel is Not a Little Cube), Alvy Ray Smith, Tech Memo 6, Jul 17, 1995

Blue Screen Matting. A.R. Smith and J. Blinn, Computer Graphics Proceedings SIGGRAPH '96, pp. 259-268.

This is a comprehensive, and mathematical treatment of the problem of determining the matte of an object given a picture of it. Unfortunately, the basic methods are protected by patents, so few people bothered to write about them. This paper provides some fancier methods that you may want to implement for your projects.
On the microsoft web page, you can find the abstract and the picutres. The Acrobat file is in the ACM digital library, that we have access to from UW.