Depixelizing Pixel Art

Earlier comments: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2601347" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2601347</a> <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2578706" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2578706</a><p>Some of the previous discussion isn't great (squabbling about dupes, not being able to download the pdf). A common comment was "hasn't this been done before". Many existing tools output higher-res bitmaps, this tool outputs vector images. They did run comparisons to a variety of algorithms, including potrace, which also generates vectors.

Even though it does a terrible job staying true to the source material, I'd bet playing an old game rendered through a vector magic filter would have an interesting abstract aspect to it.

Here's a page where you can compare various algorithms, including this new one, over many classic pieces of pixel art:<p><a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/supplementary/multi_comparison.html" rel="nofollow">http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/...</a>

I like the algorithm, but the hq4x seems to produce better fine shapes such as eyes and skeleton bones (albeit in bitmap form) - it would be interesting to see some sort of hybrid algorithm taking the best features of both to produce a vector output.

I wonder how difficult is it to generalize the algorithm to 3d voxels, and apply it on Minecraft.

This is an interesting paper. Though I only read the abstract, it seems like real-time performance could be achieved by utilizing GPUs for B-spline calculations. Would be awesome for video games if real-time performance can be achieved!

Sorry about the anti-climatic question, but I'm genuinely curious: What's the main application of this research, other than prettifying old video games?

Previous discussion: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2601347" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2601347</a>

Wouldn't this be much harder if the background had more than one color as well? If that is the case, this new technique may not be applicable to emulators

What is the @article block at the bottom of the page?

great job, I'd like to see it applied on <a href="http://draw.heroku.com" rel="nofollow">http://draw.heroku.com</a> drawings

Love it.