Computer graphics (computer science)

Computer graphics is a sub-field of computer science which studies methods for digitally synthesizing and manipulating visual content. Although the term often refers to the study of three-dimensional computer graphics, it also encompasses two-dimensional graphics and image processing. Computer graphics studies manipulation of visual and geometric information using computational techniques. It focuses on the mathematical and computational foundations of image generation and processing rather than purely aesthetic issues. Computer graphics is often differentiated from the field of visualization, although the two fields have many similarities. Connected studies include: Applied mathematics Computational geometry Computational topology Computer vision Information visualization Scientific visualization Applications of computer graphics include: Print design Digital art Special effects Video games Visual effects History of computer animation and Computer graphics#History There are several international conferences and journals where the most significant results in computer graphics are published. Among them are the SIGGRAPH and Eurographics conferences and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Transactions on Graphics journal. The joint Eurographics and ACM SIGGRAPH symposium series features the major venues for the more specialized sub-fields: Symposium on Geometry Processing, Symposium on Rendering, Symposium on Computer Animation, and High Performance Graphics. As in the rest of computer science, conference publications in computer graphics are generally more significant than journal publications (and subsequently have lower acceptance rates). A broad classification of major subfields in computer graphics might be: Geometry: ways to represent and process surfaces Animation: ways to represent and manipulate motion Rendering: algorithms to reproduce light transport Imaging: image acquisition or image editing The subfield of geometry studies the representation of three-dimensional objects in a discrete digital setting.