THE FARTHEST POINT STRATEGY FOR PROGRESSIVE IMAGE SAMPLING

A new method of farthest point strategy (FPS) for progressive image ac quisition-an acquisition process that enables an approximation of the whole image at each sampling stage-is presented. Its main advantage is in retaining its uniformity with the increased density, providing eff icient means for sparse image sampling and display, In contrast to pre viously presented stochastic approaches, the FPS guarantees the unifor mity in a deterministic min-max sense, Within this uniformity criterio n, the sampling points are irregularly spaced, exhibiting anti-aliasin g properties comparable to those characteristic of the best available method (Poisson disk), A straightforward modification of the FPS yield s an image-dependent adaptive sampling scheme, An efficient O(N log N) algorithm for both versions is introduced, and several applications o f the FPS are discussed.