Autodesk files to patent flood filling of anti-aliased boundaries

Filed a year aog, patent application number 12/352,801 describes:

A method of performing a flood fill on an image, the method comprising: determining image points to be flood filled based on the color of a seed point; and deblending this seed color from image points among the image points to be filled, where an image point is deblended based on its color and based on the seed color.

From the figures attached to Autodesk's application, it appears that the company is trying to solve this problem: how do you flood fill into a boundary made of anti-aliased lines? 

The problem is that anti-alised lines are made up of a number of colored pixels, and so a flood-fill algorithm has to which off-color pixels are part of the boundary. Autodesk's idea is to check the color and distance of neighbouring pixels. 

Comments

[cord]

i'm interested to see how it's different from the 'live trace' tool that has been part of adobe illustrator for many years. the description sounds exactly the same.

[boundaryoflife]

just figured out that Flood Fill also works to trace edges, and not only for painting areas with Microsoft Paint. Maybe Microsoft has a patent that led to the misunderstanding of biological growth processes (balance with a priority queue, and not with multithreading?), so things about epidemics are better taught for academics?