MidtermGuide

A Guide to Studying for the Midterm

The Midterm will be from 7:15-9:00 on November 1st in 1221 CS. It should not take that long. The TAs estimated 45 minutes. I'd say more like an hour.

The exam will cover all materials from the first 8 weeks of class. All topics that were in the readings or lectures are fair game.

''We will not ask you about the specifics of OpenGL or FlTk." You need to understand the concepts used in OpenGL (like transformation matrices), but you don't need to remember what the arguments to the call that sets up a projection matrix is.

The exam will be closed books and closed notes. It is designed so that you shouldn't need a calculator.

The Main.LectureNotes are a good way to remind yourself what we talked about in class.

An outline of the high points of the class so far...

• Eyes and Displays
  • Pinhole imaging, Aperatures, focus
  • Measurement on the image plane by eyes and cameras
  • Perception, dynamic range, sensitivity, contrast
• Intensity and Quantization
  • Gamma cottection
  • Quantization / halftoning
• Sampling
  • Aliasing
  • Intuitions of sampling theory
  • Sampling Theory: frequency domain, nyquist limit, ideal reconstruction
  • Convolutions
  • Prefiltering, practical frequency domain operations
  • Sampling and Resampling (practical issues, warping)
• Raster Algorithms
  • Drawing Points
  • Drawing Lines: Brezenham's algorithm
• Color
  • Color vision in animals
  • Faking colors with combinations of primaries
  • Gamut, perceptual color spaces
  • Color systems (XYZ, YCC, CMYK, HLS, HLV)
  • Color tables
• Image file formats
  • Lossless compression: RLE, Huffman Coding, Lempel-Ziv
  • Lossy Coding
  • JPEG and MPEG
• Polygon inside-outside tests
• Transformations and Coordinate systems
  • View of transformations as change of coordinate systems
  • Linear Transformations
  • Homogeneous Coordinates
  • Matrix formulations, matrix stack / scene graphs
  • Rotations
• Projections
  • Types of projections
  • Creation of perspective using matrices (e.g. cameras and shadows)
  • Specifying cameras
• Graphics Pipeline
  • graphics toolkit concepts
  • double buffering, stateless/stated systems, immediate vs. retained mode
• Visibility/Occlusion
  • Painter's algorithm
  • BSP Tree
  • Z-Buffer
• Curves
  • parameterizations
  • properties of curves
  • matrix form derivations
  • cubic forms
  • interpolating splines

Note: Approximating Curves are NOT on the exam