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🎨 Graphics, Vision & Media

Pixels, polygons and perception. 49 topics, from beginner to advanced.

Graphics, vision and media cover how computers create and understand images, audio and video. This area explains rasterization and ray tracing for rendering, image representation and compression, and computer vision for recognizing objects in pictures. These techniques power games, photo editing, medical imaging and video streaming.

Who this area is for

Game developers, graphics programmers, media engineers, and anyone who wants to understand how images, sound and video are produced and stored.

Real-world use cases

Rendering a 3D scene in a game engine by projecting triangles onto the screen.
Compressing photos so they load quickly on a web page.
Detecting faces in a camera feed for autofocus or photo tagging.
Compressing product photos so that a web page loads quickly without visible damage.
Lighting a 3D scene so that surfaces look shiny or matte.

Topics in Graphics, Vision & Media

Beginner (17)

Pixels and Resolution — Smallest picture elements and image dimensions.
Color Models — RGB, CMYK and HSV ways of representing color.
Raster vs Vector Graphics — Pixel grids versus mathematically defined shapes.
Image Formats — JPEG, PNG and GIF trade-offs.
Image Compression — Reducing image size with lossless or lossy methods.
Audio Basics — Sampling and quantizing sound.
Video Basics — Frames, frame rate and codecs.
Coordinate Systems — Cartesian spaces used to position graphics.
Line Drawing Algorithms — Rasterizing lines such as Bresenham's.
Polygons and Meshes — Surfaces approximated by connected faces.
2D Transformations — Translation, rotation and scaling in the plane.
Matrices in Graphics — Using matrices to combine transformations.
Animation Principles — Techniques creating motion from sequences of frames.
Game Loop — Repeating cycle of input, update and render.
Sprites and Tilemaps — 2D images and grid-based level layouts.
Collision Detection — Determining when objects intersect.
3D Transformations — Moving and orienting objects in space.

Intermediate (16)

Camera and Projection — Mapping 3D scenes onto a 2D view.
Rendering Pipeline — Stages transforming geometry into pixels.
Rasterization — Converting geometry into fragments on a pixel grid.
Z-Buffer — Per-pixel depth test resolving visibility.
Shading Models — Phong and Lambert lighting calculations.
Texture Mapping — Wrapping images over surfaces.
Shaders — Small GPU programs controlling vertex and pixel processing.
Ray Tracing — Simulating light rays to produce realistic images.
Global Illumination — Light bouncing between surfaces for realism.
Bézier Curves and Splines — Smooth curves defined by control points.
Mesh Simplification — Reducing polygon counts while keeping shape.
Skeletal Animation — Moving a mesh by deforming an underlying skeleton.
Physics Engines — Simulating forces and rigid bodies.
Procedural Generation — Algorithmically creating content like terrain.
Noise Functions — Perlin-style randomness for natural patterns.
Image Filtering — Convolving images for blur and sharpen effects.

Advanced (16)

Edge Detection — Finding abrupt intensity changes in images.
Histogram Equalization — Redistributing intensities to improve contrast.
Morphological Operations — Erosion and dilation on binary images.
Fourier Analysis of Images — Frequency-domain view of signals and pictures.
Feature Detection — Locating distinctive keypoints in images.
Image Segmentation — Partitioning an image into meaningful regions.
Object Detection — Locating and classifying objects in images.
Image Classification — Assigning a label to an entire image.
Optical Flow — Estimating apparent motion between frames.
Stereo Vision — Recovering depth from two viewpoints.
Structure from Motion — Reconstructing 3D scenes from image sequences.
SLAM — Building a map while tracking location simultaneously.
Augmented and Virtual Reality — Overlaying or immersing users in virtual content.
Video Codecs — Algorithms like H.264 compressing video.
Speech Recognition — Converting spoken audio into text.
Neural Rendering — Learning-based scene representation such as NeRF.

How to study Graphics, Vision & Media

Start with pixels and coordinates, then build a tiny renderer that draws one triangle. Change one parameter at a time, such as the light direction or the filter size, and look at the result before reading the next topic.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between rasterization and ray tracing?

Rasterization projects triangles onto the screen and is fast, which makes it the standard for real-time games. Ray tracing follows light paths and produces more realistic lighting at higher cost.

What is a pixel?

A pixel is the smallest addressable element of a digital image. Each pixel stores color values, commonly as red, green and blue intensities.

Why are some image formats smaller than others?

Formats such as JPEG use lossy compression that discards detail the eye notices least, while PNG is lossless and keeps every pixel exactly. Choose based on whether exact detail matters.

Do I need advanced math for computer graphics?

Linear algebra for vectors, matrices and transforms is the core requirement. Most of the rest can be learned as you need it.