Image simplification and vectorization

Abstract

We present an unsupervised system which takes digital photographs as input, and generates simplified, stylized vector data as output. The three component parts of our system are image-space stylization, edge tracing, and edge-based image reconstruction. The design of each of these components is specialized, relative to their state of the art equivalents, in order to improve their effectiveness when used in such a combined stylization/vectorization pipeline. We demonstrate that the vector data generated by our system is often both an effective visual simplification of the input photographs, and an effective simplification in the sense of memory efficiency, as judged relative to state of the art lossy image compression formats.