Smoothing out sketches’ rough edges
Artists may soon have at their disposal a new MIT-developed tool that could help them create digital characters, logos, and other graphics more quickly and easily. Many digital artists rely on image vectorization, a technique that converts a pixel-based image into an image comprising groupings of clearly defined shapes. In this technique, points in the image are connected by lines or curves to construct the shapes. Among other perks, vectorized images maintain the same resolution when either enlarged or shrunk down. To vectorize an image, artists often have to hand-trace each stroke using specialized software, such as Adobe Illustrator, which is laborious. Another option is using automated vectorization tools in those software packages. Often, however, these tools lead to numerous tracing errors that take more time to rectify by hand. The main culprit: mismatches at intersections where curves and lines meet. In a paper being published in the journal ACM Transactions on Graphics,...