2D Clipping Algorithms

Clipping is an operation that eliminates invisible objects from the view window.  To understand clipping, recall that when we take a snapshot of a scene, we adjust our aperture and focus to bring only desirable objects within the window and the final shot is taken once the window contains only those objects within the frame.  From the point of view of mathematics, the problem of clipping looks simple.  All that we have to do is to find out the extremities of the object and check their intersection with the window.  This however is a critical problem from the point of view of processing in computer.  In gaming industry especially, when animation at a high speed has to be shown, time complexity of these clipping methods are crucial.  You will observe that due to this reasons in most of the clipping algorithms, intersection calculations are avoided as far as possible.  The basic idea behind these algorithms is to maximize the performance and efficiency by deciding the visibility/partial visibility/invisibility of an object using the minimum number of intersection calculations.  In this section you will study clipping algorithms for the following primitive objects

• Point
• Line
• Area
• Curve
• Text