Patent ID: 7057626

Claim:
In a processing device associated with a display device that has a plurality of pixels, each pixel having a plurality of separately controllable, colored pixel sub-components which form colored stripes in either the horizontal or vertical directions, and wherein anti-aliasing is applied in a direction parallel to the colored stripes and to an image rendered with pixel sub-component precision, a method of dropout control adapted to compensate for thin image features when rendering the image, comprising the acts of: receiving a bitmap having a plurality of samples representing an image, each sample corresponding to one of the separately controllable sub-pixel components; for a direction that is parallel to the stripping formed by the sub-pixel components, identifying a set of samples within the bitmap that comprise a group of one or more adjacent samples that fall within an outline of the image; and calculating whether the set of samples comprises a minimum number of samples that fall within the outline of the image, wherein the stripping is vertical, and wherein the step of identifying a set of samples and calculating whether the set of samples comprise a minimum number of samples, are for a column and are conducted by processing sections of the bitmap, and wherein an associative table is utilized to process sections of the bitmap, such that processing sections of the bitmap comprises obtaining a section of the bitmap and rotating the orientation of the section 90 degrees so that vertically adjacent samples become horizontally adjacent.