Recommendations for converting raster images to vector graphics

Question

If a person is looking to batch convert a large number of raster images into vector graphics, are there any tools out there that do that well?

For an example, think of j

Answer 1

Maybe the desktop edition (not free) of Vector Magic could help you out.

Link: http://vectormagic.com/

Answer 2

I'll enthusiastically second the nomination of Vector Magic.

I recently did some raster to vector conversion work with Adobe Live Trace (Photoshop CS2). It required quite a bit of tuning to get frmo horrible to acceptable.

I tried exactly the same conversion with Vector Magic (used the online version, the first two are free), the configuration questions were easy, the pallete editing was simple and intuitive, and the results were excellent, extremely clean, on the first try. Clearly they have sorted out the issues in de-noising and de-anti-aliasing to produce clean vectors. (In contrast to Adobe which takes noise tones and alias tones and decides to make lots of tweaky little vectors out of them.)

Another alternative is Corel PowerTRACE, though I have no experience with it.

Answer 3

As of today 2021.1.13,

I think Vector Magic is still the best tool on the market, they are pround to declare that on their website:

"Simply the Best Auto-Tracer in the World"
You can test out their online raster to vector conversion for free. https://vectormagic.com/

But there are, Indeed, so many techniques in Lab seems quite appearing, Like this one:
Perception-Driven Semi-Structured Boundary Vectorization

You can get their tech details and demo software here: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/labs/imager/tr/2018/PerceptionDrivenVectorization/

The result turn out to be so good, quite impressive, but the speed of conversion is quite impressive too, way too slow.

Authors of that paper are from:
1 University of British Columbia, 2 Adobe, 3 National Taiwan University

I don't know why they not do some speed optimization, build an better UI and make an awesome tool from that work.

Answer 4

Inkscape uses the Potrace engine to trace raster graphics. You usually have to play with it a bit to get useful output, but it does surprisingly well and is easy to use.

Answer 5

Imagetracer is a free and open source (Public Domain) library and application which might be useful to batch convert files. Disclaimer: I made these.

Get ImageTracer.jar from

https://github.com/jankovicsandras/imagetracerjava

and then the basic usage is:

java -jar ImageTracer.jar smiley.png

This can be automated with standard CLI batch processing, for example with bash:

for file in *.png; do java -jar ImageTracer.jar "$file" outfilename "${file/%ext/svg}"; done

This should create SVGs from all PNGs in the current folder.