Image Vectorization With Real-Time Thin-Plate Spline

• Published in: IEEE transactions on multimedia Vol. 22; no. 1; pp. 15 - 29
• Main Authors: Chen, Kuo-Wei, Luo, Ying-Sheng, Lai, Yu-Chi, Chen, Yan-Lin, Yao, Chih-Yuan, Chu, Hung-Kuo, Lee, Tong-Yee
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 01.01.2020; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Compressibility; Compression ratio; Editing; Feature extraction; hybrid vector representation; Image coding; Image color analysis; Image compression; Image manipulation; Image reconstruction; Interactive systems; Interpolation; Mapping; Plates (structural members); Real time; real-time editability; Real-time systems; Real-time vector graphics; Rendering (computer graphics); Representations; Salience; Scalability
• ISSN: 1520-9210; 1941-0077
• DOI: 10.1109/TMM.2019.2922126

The vector graphics with gradient mesh can be attributed to their compactness and scalability; however, they tend to fall short when it comes to real-time editing due to a lack of real-time rasterization and an efficient editing tool for image details. In this paper, we encode global manipulation geometries and local image details within a hybrid vector structure, using parametric patches and detailed features for localized and parallelized thin-plate spline interpolation in order to achieve good compressibility, interactive expressibility, and editability. The proposed system then automatically extracts an optimal set of detailed color features while considering the compression ratio of the image as well as reconstruction error and its characteristics applicable to the preservation of structural and irregular saliency of the image. The proposed real-time vector representation makes it possible to construct an interactive editing system for detail-maintained image magnification and color editing as well as material replacement in cross mapping, without maintaining spatial and temporal consistency while editing in a raster space. Experiments demonstrate that our representation method is superior to several state-of-the-art methods and as good as JPEG, while providing real-time editability and preserving structural and irregular saliency information.