Abstract: The clipping operation is still the bottleneck of the graphics pipeline in spite of the latest developments in graphical hardware and a significant increase in performance. Algorithms for line and line segment clipping have been studied for a long time and many research papers have been published so far. This paper presents a new robust approach to line and line segment clipping using a rectangular window. A simple extension for the case of convex polygon clipping is presented as well.

The presented approach does not require a division operation and uses homogeneous coordinates for input and output point representation. The proposed algorithms can take advantage of operations supported by vector-vector hardware.

The main contribution of this paper is a new approach to intersection computations applied to line and line segment clipping. This approach leads to algorithms that are simpler, robust, and easy to implement.