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Online auto-tracing tool (converts bitmaps to vector art)

vectormagic.stanford.edu — Stanford University research project on converting bitmap images to vector art, aka "auto tracing" or "automatic vectorization". Similar to Adobe Illustrator's Live Trace and CorelDRAW's PowerTRACE but works better in many cases. Upload image and get a converted result (EPS/SVG) in a few moments.

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  • TNeloms, on 11/12/2007, -6/+22Wow, this things work really well on all my logos. Good job!
    • blacknred0, on 11/12/2007, -8/+7you can tell the difference between your old one and the new one
      site: bookmarked
      • geekoid, on 11/12/2007, -0/+2I think he meant "can't", since why would he bookmark an unsatisfactory site?
  • varungp, on 11/10/2007, -4/+7The results are amazing!
  • hugoh, on 11/15/2007, -6/+12This is superb! I've struggled with the results from Corel for many years. Thank you, thank you!
  • parsreg, on 11/08/2007, -3/+5keep up the good work :-)
  • scubabud, on 10/27/2007, -8/+3Excellent program, traces the logos corel and Illustrator will not.
  • stelt, on 10/27/2007, -12/+6Very nice.
    Added to SVG links resource http://svg.startpagina.nl
  • beelz, on 11/12/2007, -1/+46cool that they made it free to anyone. but i feel that Illustrator's live trace has more control but its not free.. So thank you Stanford
    • branndon, on 11/14/2007, -0/+9Adobe may have more control, but from the samples they give, this has superior results.
    • zarand, on 11/14/2007, -1/+12Not to sound like an elitist, but In my experience, LiveTrace is almost completely unusable for professional application and produces a sloppy, obviously amateur result at best.
  • bradsucks, on 10/30/2007, -3/+9Very nice. Awesome for getting bitmaps onto shirts.
    • FuriousGopher, on 10/27/2007, -1/+2What method do you use to print images on shirts? Professional printing or cheap, DIY method?
  • cementfloor, on 11/14/2007, -38/+5I remember this episode of I Love Lucy when Ricky had a serious drinking problem.
  • newJxE, on 11/12/2007, -6/+11It's not any better than the Illustrator version and it's a lot slower, but it's a lot easier to use and it's free.
    • hoshizakistar, on 10/29/2007, -2/+4not any better? easier to use and free sounds better to me.
    • geekoid, on 11/12/2007, -0/+3The quality compared to Illustrator is superior. This application is far smarter at working out nuances of bitmaps even when the bitmaps are small. Illustrator only works well with higher resolution samples, and the quality is nowhere near as good as this can produce in terms of actual vector polygons. I performed a test on a complex bitmap (a photo), and Illustrator created 23,000 polygons. This app created 4000, and it looked cleaner and smoother. Illustrator also took far longer to create the trace.
  • kaffein, on 11/10/2007, -6/+24http://potrace.sourceforge.net/ is a nice command line based converter as well...
    • kaffein, on 10/26/2007, -0/+6But after watching the video (since the site is being reamed atm) I like this web tool better. :D
    • Kajico, on 10/27/2007, -1/+8I actually want to digg you up. This actually helps me more than the online one. Batch conversions.
      • kaffein, on 10/26/2007, -0/+2Good point, batch conversions are extremely useful...
    • jhshukla, on 10/30/2007, -3/+3only one issue. it works with black & white only. but it's OSS so Happy Coding!
  • Shiftgood, on 11/12/2007, -9/+2Good.
  • wendelgee2, on 11/12/2007, -13/+9Thought it said "auto-racing," got really excited. I guess "auto-tracing" is pretty cool too.... :T
    • MrPig, on 11/12/2007, -9/+7Redneck.
      • wendelgee2, on 11/04/2007, -3/+7nope. if you could race a car by remote over the internet you wouldn't think that was awesome?
        • praisethelard, on 06/06/2008, -1/+1As long as we could crash into other cars and explode.
        • Atomic1fire, on 11/11/2007, -0/+2or get nitro and jump ramps
        • Zarthia, on 11/11/2007, -0/+2so get a gamepad and a racing game
  • shashib, on 10/28/2007, -6/+3great i always wonderd whn we would use the leaness of SVG
  • reecon, on 10/27/2007, -7/+1I agree... it is very cool, but no better that Illustrator... except that it's free. Of course.. Illustrator is sometimes free :)
  • LoudMusic, on 10/27/2007, -4/+1It does a pretty good job. I converted an image with black background and white five-pointed starts. Some of the starts came out as stars but the smaller ones came out as pentagons.

    The reason we like vector better than raster is that raster simply doesn't have enough data to scale. In order to make a good vector you need lots of raster data.
    • gregdigg, on 11/12/2007, -9/+3What are "starts"?
      • Scorps111, on 10/27/2007, -5/+5y are there arseholes like gregdigg who constantly complain about spelling if u even had half a brain u could understand what he is saying
        • krets, on 10/27/2007, -1/+3They made the same typo twice. I was kind of wondering what a "start" was too to tell you the truth.
        • CrossmenX, on 10/28/2007, -2/+2Why would you defend someone who perpetuates the loss of intelligence in today’s society? And why can you not even spell out three letter words? To me, people like you are the frustrating ones.

          LoudMusic made a common mistake for people who type quickly, and gregdigg called him out on it. In the future, I’m willing to bet LoudMusic will be more careful in his posting.
          • geekoid, on 11/12/2007, -0/+1CrossmenX,

            You are an example of the worst form of Internet user. Instead of guiding, you bring down. Instead of educating, you insult.

            Additionally, "star" is a four letter word to the rest of us on the Internet.
  • over90000, on 10/26/2007, -1/+2Make sure you check out the comparisons page. This is amazing!
  • Trixrox, on 10/26/2007, -8/+1Does Mac OSX and Vista support this format natively?
    • skellener, on 10/26/2007, -0/+1OSX supports Postcript by converting to PDF natively. You can open the EPS files in Preview. They look much better in things line Create, Illustrator, Photoshop, etc...
  • gfindlay, on 11/10/2007, -2/+21Bookmarked for later when the service isn't overloaded by Digg users
  • solid12345, on 11/12/2007, -7/+2Pretty cool but yeah illustrator's live trace is better.
    • geekoid, on 11/12/2007, -1/+2Prove it. Give us a link to comparisons, indicating polygon count, file size, conversion time and quality shots.
  • DarkDx, on 10/27/2007, -8/+1Can anybody convert the ny black-on-white logo for me, please?
  • JohnnyBoy117, on 11/12/2007, -1/+43Oh no...we broke Stanford.
    • flatlinebb, on 11/14/2007, -0/+28Next project - break Google by searching for 'google'.
    • hoshizakistar, on 10/27/2007, -0/+4did somebody try and auto-trace the stanford logo? I hear that breaks the app.
  • fLUx1337, on 10/26/2007, -1/+1Wow, just tried this (took along time), and it looks amazing!

    I have scaled size of the image from around 500px wide to over 1500px wide and it looks SO clean!
  • Toronto86er, on 10/27/2007, -0/+2servers overloaded. yay.

    Does look great, though. Can't wait til the Digg effect wears off.
  • Stephen1424, on 10/27/2007, -2/+6can you say Digg Effect ?
    • soot, on 10/26/2007, -0/+1Its not going that slow, the progress bar just didn't update for me until it jumped to around 70%. It'll take a few though.
    • Nick2632, on 10/27/2007, -0/+3Digg Effect
  • rheaume, on 11/12/2007, -0/+29I want a standalone app :(
  • insub2, on 10/27/2007, -0/+5has anyone compared this to Inkscape? ...i'll do it later but i have no time right now.
  • opticsnake, on 11/08/2007, -4/+2Did a great job on the master chief I uploaded
    http://vectormagic.stanford.edu/vctr/vctr_flex?p=v ...
    • krz9000, on 10/26/2007, -0/+1uhm yeah...i guess that kind of detail you can get with all of those other tools as well. it will be more interesting to see what it does if you go for maximum detail
  • dancegruv, on 11/10/2007, -0/+6Digg effect. "sorry we cant handle digg traffic at the moment, please try back when everyone is asleep!"
  • Thisistooboring, on 10/26/2007, -1/+2Stanford rocks my friggin' socks off... No more art charges!
  • JoeWhy, on 10/27/2007, -3/+4I don't see what's so special about this. This has been possible and has been going on for years. The open-source command-line tool "autotrace" has been around for a long time and used for this purpose. So, I don't get what the big deal is. Here's some more use of automated, online vector generation moving through the entire photo collection that is Flickr.com - http://pallit.lhi.is/on_everything From what I understand, he uses autotrace via Perl scripts.
    • rootneg2, on 12/15/2007, -0/+1It's special because it's much better than any of the other current solutions.

      Vector tracing is not a trivial problem, and there is always room for improvement; this was a big improvement.

      very cool link though
  • phaed, on 10/27/2007, -0/+2Its down damit. Half way though my image too.
  • BiggPa, on 10/27/2007, -1/+1http://vectormagic.stanford.edu/vctr/vctr_flex?p=s ...
    I am pretty sure that this is my family crest (Hirashima)
  • spiralspirit, on 10/26/2007, -2/+1the advantage of the photoshop version being the customizability and tolerance levels.
  • h3lx, on 10/26/2007, -0/+1This works as good as Streamline did back in the day... Good for free.
  • lucidguru, on 11/10/2007, -0/+18Oh nice... now I gotta find that eye chart with the girls on it that was dugg a few days ago.
  • mhender, on 10/27/2007, -2/+1"Watch a video showing how to use this site,
  • Marcateyou, on 11/09/2007, -1/+9Haha down for maintenance, or down because digg effect?
  • badsector, on 10/27/2007, -0/+1Nice find!
  • FranksValli, on 10/27/2007, -0/+1Haha, the site keeps going up and down.. they must have some automated thing that does this to regulate bandwidth - by keeping the site down for 50% of the time or something.
  • modemlooper, on 11/08/2007, -2/+3pagina is pikachus vajayjay
  • duncancarroll, on 10/27/2007, -0/+1for the love of god, someone tell them to re-design their logo, it's making me cross-eyed.
  • ZeroCoolZ, on 10/27/2007, -1/+0Awesome!
  • zeigual, on 10/27/2007, -0/+1VectorMagic down for maintenance!

    Go Diggers!
  • soil, on 11/15/2007, -0/+6this would be great to mashup with OCR and scanning!
  • DarkSamus, on 11/10/2007, -1/+2what a tool
  • Kazrog, on 11/15/2007, -0/+8Incredible, also amazing that it's free. I would pay $200 or more for boxed software that's this good. I'd love a Mac OS X native version. Totally blows away Illustrator on all the logos I tested (jpegs, etc.) Clients are always supplying crappy jpeg logos and it drives me nuts - now I have a solution! Best web app since Google Maps.
    • orangetiki, on 10/31/2007, -1/+1I'm actually not seeing that much better versions out of auto trace. Did you prep your files before you sent it out?
  • Zapita, on 10/31/2007, -2/+1The "vectorized result" showing in the website is also a jpg (you still can see the pixels when you zoom in), but download the EPS and that's the real result and it's amazing!!!
  • orangetiki, on 10/30/2007, -0/+1I'll still manual trace most of my things, but this is a very nice auto-trace program
    • johndoe2323, on 11/02/2007, -0/+0Same here, but this can be pretty helpful for some parts of an image that would otherwise cost me lots of time and nerves to trace myself!
  • TROXLEY, on 11/02/2007, -0/+0This is just great!!! Works well!
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