A new approach to line and line segment clipping in homogeneous coordinates

The clipping operation is still the bottleneck of the graphics pipeline in spite of the latest developments in graphical hardware and a significant increase in performance. Algorithms for line and line segment clipping have been studied for a long time and many research papers have been published so far. This paper presents a new robust approach to line and line segment clipping using a rectangular window. A simple extension for the case of convex polygon clipping is presented as well. The presented approach does not require a division operation and uses homogeneous coordinates for input and output point representation. The proposed algorithms can take advantage of operations supported by vector–vector hardware. The main contribution of this paper is a new approach to intersection computations applied to line and line segment clipping. This approach leads to algorithms that are simpler, robust, and easy to implement.