Franklin C. Crow

Franklin C. Crow or Frank Crow is a computer scientist who has made important contributions to computer graphics, including some of the first practical anti-aliasing techniques. Crow also proposed the shadow volume technique for generating geometrically accurate shadows. Interactive shadow volume rendering was popularized by the video game Doom 3.

Crow studied electrical engineering at the University of Utah College of Engineering under Ivan Sutherland, a pioneer in computer graphics.

He taught at the University of Texas and Ohio State University and was involved with research at Xerox PARC, Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group, and Interval Research.

From 2001 to 2008, he worked for NVIDIA as a GPU architect designing rasterization algorithms.

Publications

• "Parallel Computing for Graphics." Advances in Computer Graphics, 1990:113-140.
• "Parallelism in rendering algorithms." in Graphics Interface 88, June 6–10, 1988, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. p. 87-96
• "Advanced Image Synthesis - Anti-Aliasing." Advances in Computer Graphics, 1985:419-440.
• "Advanced Image Synthesis - Surfaces." Advances in Computer Graphics, 1985:457-467.
• "Computational Issues in Rendering Anti-Aliased Detail." COMPCON, 1982:238-244.
• "Toward more complicated computer imagery." Computers & Graphics, 5(2-4):61-69 (1980).
• "The Aliasing Problem in Computer-Generated Shaded Images." Commun. ACM, 20(11):799-805 (1977).
• "Shadow Algorithms for Computer Graphics", Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH '77 Proceedings), vol. 11, no. 2, 242-248.

See also

• University of Texas at Austin
• Xerox PARC
• Texture mapping

External links

• Crow's groundbreaking papers
• Brief speaker biography