Computer Graphics & Multimedia MCQ

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A pixel (picture element) is the smallest unit of a raster image, each holding a single color value.

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JPEG is a raster format storing a grid of pixel values, while SVG, AI, and EPS describe images using mathematical paths (vector).

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Resolution refers to the pixel dimensions of an image (e.g., 1920x1080), determining how much detail it can display.

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RGB is an additive color model: combining red, green, and blue light at maximum intensity yields white.

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CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key/Black) is a subtractive color model designed to model how inks combine on paper for printing.

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Bit depth is the number of bits used to encode each pixel's color; a higher bit depth allows more distinct colors to be represented.

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SVG defines images with mathematical paths, so it scales to any size without losing sharpness, unlike fixed-pixel raster formats like BMP, GIF, and JPEG.

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Vector graphics use mathematically defined shapes (lines and curves), while raster graphics store images as a fixed grid of colored pixels.

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Frame rate, measured in frames per second (fps), is how many individual images are shown each second to create the illusion of motion.

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Anti-aliasing blends edge pixel colors to soften the jagged "staircase" appearance of diagonal or curved lines.

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A vertex is a point in 3D space; vertices connect to form the edges and faces that make up a 3D model.

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Texture mapping wraps a 2D image (texture) onto a 3D surface, adding visual detail without increasing geometric complexity.

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JPEG applies lossy compression that discards some image data to shrink file size, while PNG, BMP, and uncompressed TIFF preserve all the original pixel data.

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GIF supports basic frame-based animation and a limited 256-color palette, which is why it became popular for small animated images.

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Rendering computes a final 2D image from a 3D scene's geometry, materials, lighting, and camera viewpoint.

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Translation shifts every point of an object by the same distance in a given direction, preserving its shape, size, and orientation.

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Scaling resizes an object by multiplying its coordinates by scale factors along each axis.

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Rotation turns an object by a specified angle around a pivot point (in 2D) or an axis (in 3D), without changing its size.

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Orthographic projection uses parallel projection lines, so an object's size on screen does not change with its distance from the viewer — common in CAD and technical drawings.

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Perspective projection converges parallel lines toward a vanishing point, making farther objects appear smaller — similar to how human vision perceives depth.

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Compression reduces the amount of data needed to represent multimedia content, saving both storage space and network bandwidth.

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Lossy compression (e.g., JPEG) permanently removes some data to shrink file size, while lossless compression (e.g., PNG, ZIP) preserves every bit so the original can be perfectly reconstructed.

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A codec (coder-decoder) compresses (encodes) media for storage or transmission and decompresses (decodes) it for playback.

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Sampling rate (e.g., 44.1 kHz) is how many samples of the analog waveform are captured per second when converting audio to digital form.

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Vector editing works with mathematically defined shapes (paths and curves), which can be scaled to any size without becoming blurry or pixelated.

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A frame buffer is a region of memory holding the pixel data of an image, which is then scanned out to the display.

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Animation displays a rapid sequence of slightly different images, exploiting persistence of vision to create the illusion of continuous movement.

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HSV stands for Hue, Saturation, and Value, describing color in terms of its tone, intensity, and brightness — an intuitive way for humans to pick colors.

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The GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) is specialized hardware built to perform the massively parallel computations rendering requires.

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Aspect ratio (e.g., 16:9 or 4:3) expresses the proportional relationship between an image's or screen's width and height.

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Synchronization keeps related media streams (such as audio and video, or subtitles) aligned in time during playback, preventing problems like lip-sync errors.

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Rasterization converts geometric primitives — such as the triangles that make up a 3D scene — into pixels on a raster display.

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3D modeling is the process of using software to construct a digital representation of an object's surfaces and structure in three dimensions.

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A light source determines how surfaces in a 3D scene are illuminated, which directly affects shading, shadows, and the overall sense of realism.

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Streaming sends audio/video data in a continuous flow so playback can start before the entire file has finished downloading.

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Keyframes mark the important points of an animation; software then interpolates the frames in between, producing smooth motion automatically.

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Shading computes how light interacts with surfaces to determine their resulting color and brightness, contributing to a sense of depth and form.

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Because vector graphics are defined mathematically rather than as a fixed pixel grid, they can be resized infinitely without becoming blurry or pixelated.

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24-bit color allocates 8 bits each to red, green, and blue (2^24 ≈ 16.7 million combinations), commonly known as "true color".

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A scanner captures a physical image or document and converts it into a digital raster image composed of pixels.

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Multiplying transformation matrices together composes them into a single matrix that applies all the individual transformations in sequence.

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Homogeneous coordinates add an extra dimension so translation — normally an addition — can be performed via matrix multiplication, alongside rotation and scaling.

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The standard 2D rotation matrix uses cos(θ) and sin(θ) to compute the rotated point's new x and y coordinates.

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Perspective division divides x, y, and z by w, converting clip-space coordinates into normalized device coordinates and producing the foreshortening effect of perspective.

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A z-buffer records the depth of the nearest surface rendered so far at each pixel, ensuring closer surfaces correctly occlude those farther away.

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Gouraud shading calculates lighting only at vertices and interpolates the resulting colors across the polygon — faster, but less precise than per-pixel shading.

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Phong shading interpolates normals across a surface and evaluates lighting at each pixel, producing smoother and more realistic specular highlights than Gouraud shading.

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Mipmaps are precomputed, downsampled texture copies used at varying viewing distances, reducing shimmering/aliasing while improving rendering performance.

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Bézier curves use a handful of control points to define smooth, scalable curves — widely used in vector illustration and for easing/motion paths in animation.

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Tweening automatically generates the frames that connect two keyframes, producing smooth transitions without manually drawing every single frame.

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YCbCr separates brightness (Y) from color (Cb, Cr), enabling chroma subsampling — reducing color data with little perceived quality loss because human vision is more sensitive to brightness than to color detail.

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Chroma subsampling (e.g., 4:2:0) records less color detail than brightness detail, exploiting the eye's lower sensitivity to color resolution to cut data size.

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Intra-frame compression encodes each frame on its own (like a still image), whereas inter-frame compression stores mainly the differences between frames, removing a great deal of redundancy in video.

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A scene graph is a tree-like structure that organizes objects and their transformations hierarchically, simplifying rendering, culling, and spatial queries.

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Back-face culling skips polygons whose normals face away from the viewer, since they would be hidden anyway — saving rendering time without affecting the final image.

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After vertices are transformed into screen space, primitives are clipped against the view volume and rasterized into fragments, which are subsequently shaded.

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Alpha compositing merges a foreground image with a background using a transparency (alpha) channel, enabling overlays and soft-edged effects.

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RLE compresses data by replacing consecutive runs of identical values with a single value and a repeat count — particularly effective on images with large uniform regions.

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DCT converts image blocks into frequency-domain coefficients; JPEG quantizes these and discards high-frequency detail the eye is less sensitive to, achieving lossy compression.

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PNG's lossless compression preserves exact pixel values, avoiding the blocky artifacts that JPEG's lossy compression can introduce around sharp edges and text.

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Ray casting fires one ray per pixel from the viewpoint into the scene to determine the closest intersecting surface, forming the foundation for more advanced techniques like ray tracing.

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Bilinear interpolation averages the colors of surrounding texels weighted by distance, yielding smoother gradients than the blocky look produced by nearest-neighbor sampling.

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Gamma correction compensates for the non-linear way displays convert pixel values into light intensity (and how human vision perceives brightness), keeping images looking correct.

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Clipping discards or trims geometry that lies outside the camera's view frustum, so only potentially visible portions continue on to rasterization, saving processing time.

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Double buffering renders the next frame to an off-screen buffer and only displays it once finished, avoiding the visual tearing caused by updating the screen mid-draw.

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LOD techniques substitute lower-detail meshes or textures for objects far from the viewer — where fine detail is less noticeable — reducing the rendering workload.

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Normals indicate the orientation of a surface; lighting computations use the angle between the normal and the light direction to determine how bright and shaded the surface appears.

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Supersampling renders the scene at a higher-than-display resolution and averages multiple samples per final pixel, smoothing edges at the cost of extra computation.

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Tessellation breaks larger surfaces into smaller polygons, allowing finer geometric detail — often added adaptively, with more subdivision applied to closer objects.

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Vertex shaders process every vertex, typically applying model, view, and projection transformations and forwarding attributes such as normals and texture coordinates.

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Fragment (pixel) shaders execute once per rasterized fragment, computing its final output color from lighting, textures, and other surface data.

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Morphing gradually blends the geometry and/or color of a source image or shape into a target one across a series of frames, producing a smooth transformation effect.

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Bandwidth determines how much data can be delivered per second; insufficient bandwidth forces lower bitrates or resolutions, or causes buffering interruptions during playback.

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Adaptive bitrate streaming switches between several pre-encoded quality levels in real time according to the viewer's available bandwidth, minimizing buffering while maximizing achievable quality.

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The "value" (brightness/lightness) component of HSV controls how light or dark a color looks, independent of its hue or saturation.

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CMYK models how inks subtractively combine on paper, so converting to it beforehand helps designers anticipate and adjust for the color shifts that occur during printing.

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Interlacing splits each frame into two fields of alternating scan lines shown in sequence, lowering the data rate needed for a given perceived refresh rate — a technique used in older television systems.

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Normal mapping uses a texture that encodes surface normal directions to simulate small-scale geometric detail during shading, without increasing the actual polygon count.

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Deferred shading separates geometry rendering from lighting: surface data is captured into G-buffers, then lighting is computed only for visible pixels — dramatically reducing redundant shading work when many lights are present.

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Ambient occlusion estimates how much ambient light reaches each point on a surface based on nearby geometry, producing the soft shadowing seen in corners and contact points that adds noticeable depth.

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Ray tracing follows the propagation of light (including secondary bounces for reflections, refractions, and shadows) for high physical accuracy, while rasterization projects geometry to screen space and approximates lighting for speed.

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Whitted-style ray tracing recursively spawns reflection and refraction rays at reflective or transparent surfaces, combining their contributions to render convincing mirrors, glass, and similar materials.

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Radiosity simulates how diffusely reflective surfaces exchange light energy with each other, capturing effects such as soft indirect lighting and color bleeding that direct-lighting-only models miss.

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The rendering equation expresses outgoing radiance at a point as emitted radiance plus the integral of incoming radiance scattered by the surface's BRDF — a unifying formulation underlying ray tracing, radiosity, and path tracing.

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A BRDF mathematically describes how a surface reflects light between incoming and outgoing directions, forming the basis for realistically simulating different material types — matte, glossy, metallic, and so on.

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Path tracing uses Monte Carlo sampling to trace many random light paths per pixel and average their contributions, capturing indirect lighting, soft shadows, and other global illumination effects — at the cost of needing many samples to reduce noise.

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A BVH is a spatial data structure that nests bounding volumes around groups of objects; intersection tests can then quickly discard whole branches a ray misses, dramatically speeding up rendering.

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SIMT allows a GPU to run identical instructions across many threads operating on different data elements (such as separate pixels or vertices), exploiting the massive data parallelism inherent in graphics workloads.

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Deferred shading separates geometry rendering from lighting by storing surface attributes in G-buffers and then applying lighting calculations only once per visible pixel, scaling far better than forward rendering when many lights are present.

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Wavelet transforms decompose an image into multiple frequency/resolution sub-bands, enabling progressive transmission and generally smoother degradation, avoiding the blocky artifacts associated with classic block-based DCT compression.

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Motion vectors describe how blocks of pixels move between frames, letting codecs like H.264/H.265 encode inter-frames primarily as references plus small residual differences — drastically reducing redundant data.

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PBR shading grounds material parameters — such as roughness and metallicity — in measurable physical quantities and enforces energy conservation, so materials look correct and consistent across different lighting environments, unlike older empirically tuned models.

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Ambient occlusion estimates how much ambient light reaches each surface point based on nearby geometry, producing soft shadowing in corners, crevices, and contact points that adds significant perceived depth and realism.

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TAA combines current-frame samples with reprojected data from previous frames — using motion vectors to account for movement — effectively boosting the sample count over time to reduce aliasing and shimmering at low per-frame cost.

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MPEG-DASH defines a standardized way to break media into segments with multiple quality variants described in a manifest, enabling adaptive bitrate streaming over ordinary HTTP servers and CDNs without specialized streaming protocols.

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Subsurface scattering simulates light entering a translucent material, bouncing around beneath the surface, and exiting at nearby points — producing the soft, semi-translucent appearance seen in skin, wax, and marble that simple surface reflection cannot reproduce.

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Neural super-resolution renders internally at a lower (cheaper) resolution and uses a trained model — frequently leveraging temporal information — to reconstruct a sharper, higher-resolution output, yielding large performance gains with minimal perceptible quality loss.

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Because SSR derives reflections from the current view's color and depth buffers, it cannot represent objects that are off-screen or hidden behind other geometry — producing missing or incorrect reflections, a limitation true ray tracing avoids by querying the actual scene geometry.

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Gamut mapping handles colors from a source space that cannot be represented in a destination gamut, applying strategies — such as perceptual or relative colorimetric mapping — that aim to preserve the overall look and relative relationships between colors rather than simply clipping them.

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Frustum culling tests whether objects lie within the camera's view frustum; combined with spatial structures like octrees or BSP trees, large portions of a scene can be discarded quickly without per-object checks, substantially improving performance in complex scenes.