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AssigneeMicrosoft Corporation
InventorNicholas P. Wilt
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A system and methods for implementing histogram computation, for example, into the rasterization pipeline of a 3-D graphics system, are provided. With the histogram computation mechanism, statistical histogram data may be generated for input data of any kind or retrieved from any source that may be specified in a 2-D array or specified in an immediate fashion to specialized data processing hardware. Depending on the nature of the input data, the data may be filtered before passing the data to data processing hardware for further processing. The data processing hardware may then apply an additional function to the input data set before calculation of the histogram data. Then, at some point, the data processing hardware may apply a function to the data to map the derived data to a real-valued function that can then be quantized to a histogram element in the range specified from zero to the number of histogram elements minus one. The corresponding element in this histogram is then incremented according to the data received as it passes through the graphics processor. Advantageously, relatively expensive host computing resources are conserved, and developers are insulated from the tedious details required of implementing histogram computation from the ground up each time it becomes desirable to compute histogram data in connection with an application.
A method for providing histogram computational ability in a computing system having a plurality of data sets transmitted through at least one processing chip for performing high speed data operations, comprising:
A computer readable medium having stored thereon a plurality of computer-executable modules, the computer executable modules comprising:
An application programming interface, stored as computer-executable instructions on a computer readable medium, for specifying at least one histogram to be computed from at least one data set as said at least one data set is transmitted through a high precision data pipeline, comprising:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.