Vector vengeance: Researchers claim they can kill the pixel within five years
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Re: Vector vengeance: Researchers claim they can kill the pixel within five years
#2Vector art is not often the holy grail as it seems. Take fonts, for instance. Even though formats like TrueType stores the data in vector format, numerous resolution-dependent "hints" have to be added to make it more readable.
Similarly vector icons appear more blurry than pixelled ones especially at lower resolutions. Extremely scaled images are unimpressive due to loss of detail.
Vector art often works well in a certain range of resolutions. The "infinite scaling" promise should be taken with a grain of salt.
Re: Vector vengeance: Researchers claim they can kill the pixel within five years
#3Summary: Video Codec based on vectorization of images rather than pixel encoding. Slow, but highly parallel. Not much info. Developers hope to have a codec for commercial use in some number of years.
PDF of authors' previous work on still images: http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/47879/1/ID47879.pdf
Still too long?: "Mona Lisa in 50 Polygons[1]" Grows Up.
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[1] http://rogeralsing.com/2008/12/07/genetic-programming-evolut...
Re: Vector vengeance: Researchers claim they can kill the pixel within five years
#4The most important line in the article is this one towards the end:
Ultimately, though, I think it will take a lot more than a new codec to kill the pixel.Re: Vector vengeance: Researchers claim they can kill the pixel within five years
#5Sigh. TL;DR version - scaling pixels makes them blocky, scaling vectors doesn't, for some small range of scaling we can keep upscaled pixels not blocky.
Upscaling has a lot of research behind it. Creating a 'vectorized' version of an image (see their paper here: http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/47879/1/ID47879.pdf) certainly helps avoid dumb scaling issues. But when you blow it up 7x (like the example) it looks like a cartoon or a bad paint by numbers painting. The issue is that you lose information about the picture when you capture it, and without that information you have to 'make up' what you think would have been there had you been able to capture it. People get a lot of mileage out of the fact that for the most part real world imagery has a lot of linear transitions but there are limits to that as well.
I think the work is interesting but as they say in their paper: "What we have shown already is that there is a viable continuous image format and that it can be used for some conventional operations which are not handled easily in sampled formats." which I agree with, but the pixel is not yet in danger of extinction :-)
Re: Vector vengeance: Researchers claim they can kill the pixel within five years
#6Vector art is not often the holy grail as it seems. Take fonts, for instance. Even though formats like TrueType stores the data in vector format, numerous resolution-dependent "hints" have to be added to make it more readable. Similarly vector icons appear more blurry than pixelled ones especially at lower resolutions. Extremely scaled images are unimpressive due to loss of detail. Vector art often works well in a ce…
It depends on the nature of the work. I could make a beautiful illustration, then scale it from here to the moon and, at least to me in my hypothetical situation, it would still look good.
Like all things, it depends. Some people crave detail, some crave resolution, some crave anything beyond the monotony of everyday life - regardless of said work's mediocrity.
Vector art can be good. Pixel art can be good. Neither are going away any time soon. I think that's the only rational conclusion to any of this.
Re: Vector vengeance: Researchers claim they can kill the pixel within five years
#7You're never going to kill the pixel until you have a display that doesn't use them.
Re: Vector vengeance: Researchers claim they can kill the pixel within five years
#8Aren't HiDPI displays killing pixels?
Re: Vector vengeance: Researchers claim they can kill the pixel within five years
#9I'm struggling to understand what the point is. Video codecs don't store data in "pixel" format either, they store wavelet coefficients, data from the frequency domain.
From the article, the source data is in pixel format. No codec format can be better than the source data. And the output is displayed on a screen with pixels. Pixels in, pixels out. The intermediate format can only make things worse, not better. It's not surprising that they're able to do better than current formats: it sounds like they're using a huge amount of CPU for encoding. You could get better compression if you created a new MPEG4 profile that required more CPU too.
The intermediate format may be tweaked to provide better results while scaling, but you could probably add scaling hints to more conventional codecs, too. Not sure what the point would be either unless the source data had a lot more pixels than the output format...
Re: Vector vengeance: Researchers claim they can kill the pixel within five years
#10Vector art is not often the holy grail as it seems. Take fonts, for instance. Even though formats like TrueType stores the data in vector format, numerous resolution-dependent "hints" have to be added to make it more readable. Similarly vector icons appear more blurry than pixelled ones especially at lower resolutions. Extremely scaled images are unimpressive due to loss of detail. Vector art often works well in a ce…
Vector art can look very good when optimised for smaller sizes. The issue is that the current formats and engines for vector use on the web.
I've spent a lot of time trying to tweak my vector icons to work well in various browsers, and its next to impossible at the moment. More often than not SVG graphics are larger than their bitmap counterparts, almost always crash WebKit browsers, or take 5-10 seconds to render. Safari on iOS will crash if you zoom in on even the most simple graphics.
I love vector artwork, I truly do. It's the rendering engines that are letting us down.