Morphological antialiasing

Morphological antialiasing (MLAA) is a spatial anti-aliasing technique used in real-time computer graphics. It reduces artifacts, such as jaggies, when representing a high-resolution image at a lower resolution.

Contrary to multisample anti-aliasing (MSAA), which does not work for deferred rendering, MLAA is a post-process filtering which detects borders in the resulting image and then finds specific patterns in these. Anti-aliasing is achieved by blending pixels in these borders, according to the pattern they belong to and their position within the pattern.

Introduced in 2009, MLAA was an early and influential example of anti-aliasing techniques done in post-processing, which makes them suitable for deferred shading. A similar method in this class is fast approximate anti-aliasing (FXAA). Temporal anti-aliasing, also a post-process, has become the most common anti-aliasing method for real-time rendering and video games.

Enhanced subpixel morphological antialiasing, or SMAA, is an image-based GPU-based implementation of MLAA developed by Universidad de Zaragoza and Crytek.

See also

• Anisotropic filtering