“CoGIP: a Course on 2D Computer Graphics and Image Processing” by Paquette

Computer Graphics (CG) is a vast, important, and popular discipline. In Computer Science, over 90 percent of the undergraduate curricula have an optional CG course. The 2D aspects of CG such as vector primitives, 2D curves, halftoning, and 2D transformations are important in creating 2D content. Acquisition and reproduction of 2D content also requires knowledge of the Image Processing (IP) discipline. These aspects are of major importance since most of the content created, acquired, reproduced, and visualized is 2D. Yet, in typical CG courses, 2D CG and IP are only briefly presented since the focus is on 3D.

This paper proposes a course on 2D CG and IP as an alternative way to introduce CG. These two disciplines have strong theoretical relationships which can be easily exploited in a single course. In this sense, our main contributions are: (1) the description of a course on 2D CG and IP; (2) the identification of the relationships between CG and IP; (3) the identification of the benefits and the drawbacks of the proposed course; (4) an open source framework to create assignments and example topics for assignments.

As a basis to the work presented in this paper, undergraduate Computer Science curricula1 were looked at with a focus on the type of courses: traditional 3D CG, advanced CG, mixes of CG, IP, and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Even though CG can be introduced in many ways [Brown et al. 1988; Larrondo- Petrie et al. 1994; Cunningham 2002], it is typically presented in an introductory course that concentrates on 3D [Wolfe 1999; Hitchner et al. 1999]. Such a course also has to deal with IP, since the main goal is image synthesis. It also has to deal with HCI since the user interacts with the 3D objects. Despite the link between CG, IP, and HCI, 84 percent of the introductory courses are typical 3D CG courses that spend most of the time on 3D topics.

There are so many topics to cover in an undergraduate Computer Science curriculum that it may be appropriate to cover some parts of CG with another discipline. At the present time, only 3 percent of the courses on CG introduce it together with IP. This paper argues that this percentage should significantly increase.