Franklin C. (Frank) Crow is a computer scientist who has made important contributions to

computer graphics Computer graphics deals with generating images with the aid of computers. Today, computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great de ...

, including some of the first practical

spatial anti-aliasing In digital signal processing, spatial anti-aliasing is a technique for minimizing the distortion artifacts (aliasing) when representing a high-resolution image at a lower resolution. Anti-aliasing is used in digital photography, computer graphics ...

techniques. Crow also proposed the

shadow volume Shadow volume is a technique used in 3D computer graphics to add shadows to a rendered scene. They were first proposed by Frank Crow in 1977 as the geometry describing the 3D shape of the region occluded from a light source. A shadow volume divi ...

technique for generating geometrically accurate shadows.

Education

Crow studied

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

at the

University of Utah College of Engineering The College of Engineering at the University of Utah is an academic college of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah. The college offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering and computer science. History The College of Engi ...

under

Ivan Sutherland Ivan Edward Sutherland (born May 16, 1938) is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer, widely regarded as a pioneer of computer graphics. His early work in computer graphics as well as his teaching with David C. Evans in that subje ...

, a pioneer in computer graphics.

Career

Crow taught at the

University of Texas The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

NYIT The New York Institute of Technology (NYIT or New York Tech) is a private research university founded in 1955. It has two main campuses in New York—one in Old Westbury, on Long Island, and one in Manhattan. Additionally, it has a cybersecur ...

and

Ohio State University The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best publ ...

and was involved with research at

Xerox Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and electronic document, digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (ha ...

PARC,

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company b ...

's Advanced Technology Group, and

Interval Research Interval Research Corporation was founded in 1992 by Paul Allen and David Liddle. It was a Palo Alto laboratory and technology incubator focusing on consumer product applications and services with a focus on the Internet. A 1997 version of the co ...

. From 2001 to 2008, he worked for

NVIDIA Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

as a

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobi ...

architect designing

rasterization In computer graphics, rasterisation (British English) or rasterization (American English) is the task of taking an image described in a vector graphics format (shapes) and converting it into a raster image (a series of pixels, dots or lines, whic ...

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.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Crow, Franklin C. Computer graphics professionals Living people University of Utah alumni Ohio State University faculty New York Institute of Technology faculty Nvidia people Scientists at PARC (company) Year of birth missing (living people)

Education

Career

Publications

See also

References