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.^[1][2][3]

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).^[4] Temporal anti-aliasing, also a post-process, has become the most common anti-aliasing method for real-time rendering and video games.^[5]

Enhanced subpixel morphological antialiasing, or SMAA, is an image-based GPU-based implementation of MLAA^[6] developed by Universidad de Zaragoza and Crytek.^[7]

See also

• Anisotropic filtering