Aliasing

An example of aliasing

This full-sized image shows what a properly sampled image of a brick wall should look like with a screen of sufficient resolution.

When the resolution is reduced, aliasing appears in the form of a moiré pattern.

The motion of the 'camera' at a constant shutter speed creates temporal aliasing known as the wagon wheel effect. The speed of the "camera", moving towards the right, constantly increases at the same rate with the objects sliding to the left. Halfway through the 24-second loop, the objects appear to suddenly shift and head in the reverse direction, towards the right.

In signal processing and related disciplines, aliasing is the overlapping of frequency components resulting from a sample rate below the Nyquist rate. This overlap results in distortion or artifacts when the signal is reconstructed from samples which causes the reconstructed signal to differ from the original continuous signal. Aliasing that occurs in signals sampled in time, for instance in digital audio or the stroboscopic effect, is referred to as temporal aliasing. Aliasing in spatially sampled signals (e.g., moiré patterns in digital images) is referred to as spatial aliasing.

Aliasing is generally avoided by applying low-pass filters or anti-aliasing filters (AAF) to the input signal before sampling and when converting a signal from a higher to a lower sampling rate. Suitable reconstruction filtering should then be used when restoring the sampled signal to the continuous domain or converting a signal from a lower to a higher sampling rate. For spatial anti-aliasing, the types of anti-aliasing include fast approximate anti-aliasing (FXAA), multisample anti-aliasing, and supersampling.