Myaa - My Anti-Alias for Matlab

Better looking Matlab figures with anti-aliasing!

Description

Add myaa.m to your path and enjoy anti-aliased professionally looking graphics in Matlab at any time. Myaa works with any kind of graphic (3-D, plots, scatterplots, ...) and even adds anti-aliasing to text, ui controls and grids. Myaa is ideal for complex, cluttered and saturated plots.

See attached screenshot for a demonstration. More examples included in the code, just run 'help myaa'.

Curiosa:
For those of you who 'publish' your code often, an undocumented anti-aliasing option is included in the snapnow.m function in Matlab. To publish a file called test.m you can do:

opts.figureSnapMethod = 'antialiased';
publish('test.m',opts)

However, you will have more control over the process using myaa, which is also the best choice when using Matlab interactively.

In any case: Anti-aliasing is good for you! :-)

• Acknowledgements: This submission has inspired the following:; export_fig
• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.6 (R2008a)

[Petr Krysl]

Well done! Just a small suggestion for improvement: ippl() was not found by Matlab (probably because I do not have the image processing toolbox). This should be perhaps treated with a try, catch?

I have not looked at the code in detail, hence no rating yet.

[i scardanzan]

rating based on the posted visualization

[Anders Brun]

Thanks for the suggestion Petr. I have submitted a new version now, including a small change for this:

try
    if ippl()
        myconv = @imfilter;
        mypad = 'same';
    else
        myconv = @conv2;
        mypad = 'valid';
    end
catch
    myconv = @conv2;
    mypad = 'valid';
end

[Anders Brun]

For your information, every resubmission takes some time to propagate through Mathworks review process... so if you have problems related to the ippl() function, please implement the bugfix below. The new version should be available for download in about a day or so.

Thank you for your patience. /Anders

[Peter A.]

Works great, thanks!

[Per Magnusson]

myaa works great and is very easy to use. Thanks Anders!

[Andrey Krishkevich]

Beautiful!

[Matt S]

 

[Nass K]

It works fine, thanks.

[Adam Chapman]

Excellent job. Thanks very much!

[Husam Aldahiyat]

 

[Liu Michael]

Very good, wonderful...

[Stefan Novak]

Excellent job! Looking forward to future releases and features!

[Luc Masset]

Fantastic. Great work. I have been looking for an anti-aliasing feature in Matlab for years.

I've just changed two small things to have myaa to work in Matlab R13 :

line 111: remove the (), I guess it always takes @conv2

line 213: I changed this way :

    raw_lowres = double(imresize(self.raw_hires,1/self.K(2),'bilinear'))/256;
    raw_lowres = single(raw_lowres);

Thanks again Anders.

[matt dash]

 

[matt dash]

very nice, but i think it should optionally take a figure handle as an input instead of just using gcf.

[Oliver Woodford]

A nice idea that has greatly improved some figures I'm publishing.

I would have liked the function to simply save the anti-aliased output to file (png). I've now written something similar which does just that.

[Sebastian Hölz]

I hate to tell you, but your file is of very limited use. Little known fact: Matlab (at least from 7.04 on) includes an AA, it is just hidden. Try the following:
>> spharm2
>> set(gco,'LineSmoothing','on')
It will give you AA on the real 3D object, i.e. paning, rotating, zooming possible in real-time, no need for time- and memory-consuming calculations. The "LineSmoothing"-property is available for all relevant HGObjects, i.e. lines, patches, surfaces.
I think the smoothing is also applied to exported and saved figures, as long as you specify ZBuffer or OpenGL as renderer.

Sebastian

[Anders Brun]

Hi Sebastian,
I already know of LineSmoothing and I created Myaa because I needed something more general. LineSmoothing does exactly what is says, it can smooth a line. If two lines crosses, things start go wrong. And there are more relevant objects in Matlab, such as text labels and (unintentionally) hires images, say a 3000x3000 image. Myaa will show you what your figure will look like in print, LineSmoothing will not. But ofcourse LineSmoothing is useful to some people and in some situations, speed is one of its advantages but generality is not.

Believe me, nobody would be more happy than me the day Matlab can do true antialiasing in hardware. :-)

[Nitika]

Anders, Could you use this while making a movie (say with getframe)? I havent tried it yet, but it looks like - if you can, it will probably take infinite time to do that...
Nevertheless, this is a beautiful application! Thanks!

[Morag]

 

[7ate9]

 

[cartonn]

 

[cartonn]

great submission! How do you set a high super-sampling factor, a low down-sampling factor, and still get the full image? When I do those, myaa automatically zooms in and I only get some portion of the image..

[Linda F]

 

[Daniel Armyr]

I give it a 4 out of five becaus it is slow as a doornail.
I was wondering about one step that might not be strictly necessary, and that is line 198
mm = myconv(ones(size(self.raw_hires(:,:,1))),kk,'same');
Here you do a convolution on what is normally a huge matrix filled with just ones. I assume you do this to get the edge behaviour. If that is the case, you could just do it on a smaller matrix and then expand the middle row and middle column to get a larger image. My huch says that will save you an entire second of the 8 it takes on my comp.

Also, I think there is potential in using the grabframe() instead of print, but I see problems in making a high-res copy without side-effects, so that one will have to simmer a bit.

[David]

Hello Anders,

Very nice thank you!

I found it increases the text size of the original graphic - is this expected or have I found a 'feature'?

Thanks again,
David.

[Rob Campbell]

Nice. This is the sort of thing that should come built in to Malab. In general, the display of 3-D plots in Matlab leaves much to be desired.

[Dave Holden]

 

[Jonas Lundgren]

Thank you! This is useful.

[Sara]

Awesome, it's great, thank you;-)

[stephen Strenn]

Great tool. However I seem to get the following error for figures larger than, say, 640x480. Any suggestions?

??? Error using ==> conv2
Out of memory. Type HELP MEMORY for your options.

Error in ==> myaa at 198
    mm = myconv(ones(size(self.raw_hires(:,:,1))),kk,'same');

[Admin]

To add a few code , it will improve much.

1. Double resolution of temp PNG

185# print(self.source_fig,['-r',num2str(2*screen_DPI*self.K(1))], '-dpng', tempfile);

2. Then, get handle of image in figure

231# hi = image(raw_lowres);
... hi = image(...
...

3. Save image matrix

290# elseif nargout == 2
             varargout(1) = {fig};
             varargout(2) = {get(hi, 'CData')};

%%%%%%%%%%%%%

Test program

surf(peaks(60) ,'FaceColor','interp', 'FaceAlpha',0.8,'EdgeAlpha',0.8, 'LineWidth', 0.2);

set(gcf, 'Color', [1,1,1]);
[f1, cdata] = myaa([4, 2]);

imwrite(cdata, 'runtest.png', 'png');

winopen('runtest.png');

It's high resolution picture !

[Timothée]

Hi, Thanks for this tool, the rendering is great, however I have a problem with the text font size. In contrast with what David said (Jan 2010), mine is absolutely tiny (actually totally unreadable), which is really too bad.

Is there a way to fix this ?

Thanks in advance

[Thomas]

Since this discussion seems to be still up to date...

Why not simply override the rendering settings for matlab in the graphics driver?

Using my nVidia card i simply start the nVidia control center, add matlab.exe as a
program using custom settings and choose "Override all application settings" (i hope this translation from my german graphics driver is correct) and set

Antialiasing-transparency = Supersampling
and
Antialiasing-setting = 4 or 8 or ....

I cannot tell if it works well with everything you can plot in matlab - but so far it does.

[A]

Can someone remind me how to execute myaa.m? when I viewed the source code. it says I can run it simply as "myaa;" and it will operate on the "current figure". As a tests. I cropped the screenshot that came in the zip and saved the unfinished left side as it's own jpg. I then used P = imread(<filename>) to import the jpg I just saved, imshow(P) to put the images as the "current figure" then myaa. figure 1 was the orignal image as I expected but figure two (the output of myaa) was the same eyesore image I loaded. It's as if myaa did not get applied to it.

the sample code I've been running is:

I = imread('C:\Documents and Settings\amsowchu\Desktop\myaa\myaa\test.jpg');
imshow(I);
myaa;

[ubuntu21 T]

Thank you for sharing this nice code.

To easily have the image saved on my hdd, I modified 2 lines in original code:

1. 192# %delete(tempfile);
meaning that I have commented this line, such that the file with the image should not be removed

2. 182# tempfile = ['myaa_temp_screendump ',num2str(rand(1)*1e5,'%5.0f'), '.png'] ;
meaning that each time I run myaa.m, the image name should change, ending with 5 random numbers. Therefore, I do not overwrite the same image file each time I run myaa.m

[Natasha]

Only reason doesn't get 5 stars is cause saving isn't built in

[Daniel]