Scan line

Example of the scan line effect deliberately applied to an image

A scan line is one line, or row, in a raster scanning pattern, such as a video line on a cathode ray tube (CRT) display of a television or computer.

On older CRT screens the horizontal scan lines were visually discernible, even when viewed from a distance, as alternating colored lines and black lines. This is sometimes used today as a visual effect in computer graphics.

The term is used, by analogy, for a single row of pixels in a raster graphics image. Scan lines are important in representations of image data, because many image file formats have special rules for data at the end of a scan line. For example, there may be a rule that each scan line starts on a particular boundary (such as byte or word; see for example BMP file format). This means that even otherwise compatible raster data may need to be analysed at the level of scan lines in order to convert between formats.

The term is also used to desribe a set of coordinates originating from one single scan of an optical 3d scanner. Due to the projection of regular patterns or stripes, respectively, all resulting 3-d points lie on a spatial contour. Defined movements of 3d scanner or object produce a set of scan lines describing the object's surface and geometry. The combination of (successively acquired) scan lines, by exploiting this structure, enables the real-time generation of grids of scan lines.

See also

• Fax
• Raster scan
• Pixel
• Scanline rendering
• Scanline fill
• Native resolution