These requirements drive the decision to architect an innovative operating system for use in set-top terminals to optimize the network and processing capabilities of a digital set-top terminal support, ensuring a broad range applications and services are provided. The set-top terminal performance is restricted by requirements such as the management of high data throughput, limited memory in a constrained consumer device, and support for a secure environment drive. Such set-top terminals are equipped with numerous abilities including the ability to display letters or fonts as messages overlaid or superimposed on a television screen. In the new home multimedia systems, an encoded television signal is usually decoded and formatted for display on a television screen by a device commonly referred to as a “set-top terminal” or “box.” Interactive digital set-top terminals provide an open platform for developing and delivering interactive services and multimedia content to consumers across a broadcast network.
Manufacturers provide the hardware, and operating system developers provide the software that allows consumers to take advantage of these products and services from their home televisions and multimedia systems. Broadcasters and interactive content providers market these products and other media across broadcast networks. Developers use these and other tools to create multimedia content. Authoring tool developers provide environments for creating multimedia products that consumers utilize. A variety of players populate the emerging interactive television market. The once separate domains of television, computers, communications, and entertainment are currently melding to form a new marketplace for interactive television. Information service to the home is a new field, enabled by the availability of storage and transmission technologies that can store and deliver data such as video and images at an affordable cost.
More particularly, the present invention provides an efficient method for softening or “fuzzying” the edges of a font on a graphics display. The present invention relates generally to techniques for interpolating pixel values in a computer graphics display.