Comments on: The Online Tool for Precision Vectorization

The Online Tool for Precision Vectorization

Turtles all the way down — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 03:19:24 -0800

VectorMagic is a new site that uses technology from the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to transform your bitmap images into vector art that can be scaled without becoming blurry of pixelated. Here's the first image I submitted, before and after.

By: nicolin

nicolin — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 03:27:55 -0800

Great thank you

By: CheeseburgerBrown

CheeseburgerBrown — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 03:40:54 -0800

That stinkin' rocks (and any word in this sentence can be resized without aliasing)! I can't tell you how often I get four crusty pixels ripped from a corporate website as an excuse for "logo artwork." Now, instead of talking to idiots, I can simply fix the problem myself without resorting to clunky zombieware like Adobe Streamline. Thank you, Stanford.

By: Justinian

Justinian — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 03:42:58 -0800

But what are the pornographic applications?

By: loquacious

loquacious — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 03:52:08 -0800

Crap, there goes another income stream. *looks at results* Err, or not. I have a feeling I'll have work creating or rebuilding vectors for some time to come. I've been considering testing it out with "known problem images" - those faxes some pencil-head in marketing that he insists are camera ready - but so far all the examples don't appear to be any better than Corel PowerTrace in skilled hands. Which is to say - pretty sucky. Since a great deal of commercial vector art is originally created from simple, compounded shapes, it's generally easier (and much cleaner) for a good vector artist to think it through, identify how it breaks down and recreate it from scratch. Even for complicated multi-path, fountain-filled designs this gets pretty easy after a while.

By: RobotVoodooPower

RobotVoodooPower — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 05:35:24 -0800

This function has existed in apps such as CorelDraw and Illustrator for 15 or so years; they just claim to do it better.

By: hexatron

hexatron — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 05:44:42 -0800

I wrote code to do this in 1980, as part of a paint program. It can't work anything like perfectly, because if you see pixels arranged like so:

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
    XXXXXXXXXXX       
        XXX

you can't tell if there should be a sharp point at the bottom, or a smooth curve across the bottom. Anyway, this is far from new. Google 'vectorization'.

By: darkripper

darkripper — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 05:51:02 -0800

Quite amazing, It's been awhile since I've tried using some autotracer, however. Also, Cats. (this is an awesome idea to do lolcats shirts)

By: russm

russm — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 05:55:24 -0800

unfortunately it sucks on the available copies of the metcalfe ethernet diagram. I keep meaning to find the time to get that in decent enough shape to print on a tshirt.

By: sotonohito

sotonohito — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 06:03:12 -0800

Obviously the end result needs some cleanup, but it does appear that it could remove a lot of the gruntwork from vectorizing raster images.

By: melorama

melorama — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 06:10:05 -0800

This is actually quite impressive, and I say that as someone who has had to "vectorize" raster images that stupid clients supply me for various projects, ever since the "oldschool" days of Adobe Streamline, back in the early/mid 90s. The way this handles type and illustrations (best seen in the coat of arms samples) is pretty darn impressive. No, it's not perfect, but it will get you 80 to 90% of the way there, and after manually fixing it up what it missed, I dare say that it'll be as close to perfect as you can get, short of redrawing it form scratch.

By: picea

picea — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 06:18:03 -0800

Well, it's a lot more user-friendly and intuitive than the versions built in to Illustrator and Flash, but still not quite there yet. I'm not sure I see the point in bothering trying to get complex photos vectorised. This is more useful for simple bitmaps, so that's what I experimented with, getting meh results after trying to tweak.

By: GuyZero

GuyZero — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 06:20:51 -0800

This function has existed in apps such as CorelDraw and Illustrator for 15 or so years; they just claim to do it better. I was a co-op student at Corel back in, uh, 1990 when they implemented their first version of this. So 17 years. Plus they implemented a generic vector shape clipping package - it could clip one aribtrary polygon to any other arbitrary polygon. And they did it all on 66 Mhz 386's. Uphill both ways.

By: dabitch

dabitch — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 06:28:45 -0800

I love it! It'll save my ass from pixel-logos countless times in the future!

By: delmoi

delmoi — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 06:32:06 -0800

And they did it all on 66 Mhz 386's. Uphill both ways. That would be pretty damn fast for a 386. The first Pentium chips were 60mhz. :)

By: The Bellman

The Bellman — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 06:45:08 -0800

It's so funny to see all the "meh" in this thread. I'm not a graphics person and I went and looked at the "before and after link" and was like "holy SHIT that's cool"! It's all about context I guess.

By: delmoi

delmoi — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 06:59:41 -0800

Yeah, I'm not really impressed either. You do lose a lot of details that are present (but ugly) in the bitmaps. It just (to me) looks like the output of some of photoshop's built in raster filters, but with output as vectors rather then another bitmap. What's really needed for this to work is object recognition. When I see this image I can imagine what the image ought to look like at a higher resolution, because I know what it's an image of.

By: cairnish

cairnish — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 07:02:54 -0800

The before and after samples rocked me too, but after lots of tries I can't get close to similar results for my desired image. I like the 'wizardy' process, though - it makes me believe I'll get it next pass, surely. Unlike Illustrator, which just sits there, mocking me.

By: prostyle

prostyle — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 07:06:37 -0800

Yeah, it's got nothing on potrace except a silly interface. Command line or bust!

By: GuyZero

GuyZero — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 07:13:04 -0800

That would be pretty damn fast for a 386. Ugh. Fine. FINE. 486DX2's. Sheesh. 33 MHz bus speed, 66 MHz internal clock. You knew what I meant. It's so funny to see all the "meh" in this thread The technology is pretty cool, but I find it a bit sad that they're not more forthright about prior art.

By: KirkJobSluder

KirkJobSluder — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 07:17:29 -0800

Well, certainly it won't replace graphic designers any point in the near future, and the technology has been around for a while, but it's a handy thing for those clients of mine who show up wanting to print out 72dpi charts.

By: GuyZero

GuyZero — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 07:20:22 -0800

Also, what's up with the BC Lions shout-out? Rare to see CFL lovers out there.

By: ardgedee

ardgedee — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 07:21:32 -0800

What makes it impressive is that it's a fully implemented vectorization application wrapped in a Flash file of reasonable size. What used to require my desktop computer's full attention is now running as a subprocess of my web browser in a backgrounded tab while I check my mail and get real work done. Also, I get to use this for free rather than pay Adobe some $500 for a limited-use application. (On the whole, I preferred Freehand's implementation, but nobody remembers that any more.) Whether the vectorization methodology is any better than what's been around before... handwave.

By: Thorzdad

Thorzdad — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 07:22:05 -0800

Great. Now, instead of crappy-looking raster logos (lifted fro the company website) from clients, I'll be getting crappy-looking vector logos (created from art lifted from the company website) from clients. Note to any and all marketing "pros" out there...This does not absolve you from supplying the original, vector logo art for your "mission critical" booklet job. Fair warning.

By: GuyZero

GuyZero — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 07:22:27 -0800

they're not more forthright about prior art. OK, before anyone kicks my ass, they have a comparison with the Adobe & the Corel tracers. The rotational invariance demo is compelling. But I stand by the fact that it's not all that new.

By: Foosnark

Foosnark — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 07:37:17 -0800

This is pretty damn cool to somebody who's never seen a tool like this before. I may be playing with this for a while. :)

By: darkripper

darkripper — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 07:50:13 -0800

small logos don't work very well.

By: thoughtless

thoughtless — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 07:58:57 -0800

small logos don't work very well Though the teenage sci-fi boy I used to be loves what it's done to 'community weblog'. It's written by an alien! Possibly a kick-ass one!

By: pardonyou?

pardonyou? — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 08:09:30 -0800

small logos don't work very well. Are you kidding? That's awesome, and I hereby move that this new logo be adopted immediately!

By: cortex

cortex — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 08:47:24 -0800

So, to summarize: - to people that find this old hat, this is old hat - to everybody else, this is pretty damned cool - communication between the two camps consists of "no u"

By: GuyZero

GuyZero — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 09:11:50 -0800

no u

By: garlic

garlic — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 09:16:21 -0800

the metafilter logo was awesome.

By: darkripper

darkripper — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 09:27:47 -0800

So, to summarize: - to people that find this old hat, this is old hat - to everybody else, this is pretty damned cool - communication between the two camps consists of "no u" film at eleven.

By: Pink Fuzzy Bunny

Pink Fuzzy Bunny — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 10:18:16 -0800

I have pasted this before, but when I client sends me a tiny bitmap as a logo I usually just do a search on this vector logo site and see if someone has vectored it already for me. This Stanford site is going to be helpful when the search comes up dry.

By: ardgedee

ardgedee — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 10:33:42 -0800

Password protected, PFB. Got info on how to get an account?

By: five fresh fish

five fresh fish — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 17:57:38 -0800

Looking at the comparisons, I say it's doing a much better job than Corel and Adobe. It appears to be better at "guessing" what the original intent was: it's identifying swooping curves and pointy-bits better than the competition. Of course, we're only seeing the comparisons where its guesses outperform the competition. I question whether there are areas where it makes the wrong assumptions, ie. not everything is a smooth curve with a pointy end.

By: Pronoiac

Pronoiac — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 10:25:37 -0800

PFB: Wow, nice site. RDG: It didn't ask me for a password.