Calculating intersections of surfaces in screen space

Abstract

When surfaces intersect, one may desire to highlight the intersection curve in order to make the shape of the penetrating surfaces more visible. Highlighting the intersection is especially helpful when the surfaces become transparent, because transparency makes the intersections less evident. A technique for locating intersections in screen space using only the information locally available to a pixel is discussed. The technique is designed to exploit parallelism at the pixel level and was implemented on the Pixel-Planes 5 graphics supercomputer.