Hi Inkscape Developers,
I'm Vinícius dos Santos Oliveira and I'm majoring in computer science at Universidade Federal de Alagoas, Brazil. I'm not very skilled, but I use (and like) the Inkscape software for some time ( http://vinipsmaker.deviantart.com/gallery/?catpath=/ ). I have experience with GUI programming and C/C++/Python/..., so I think I can develop to Inkscape. I'll try to fix some "easy-fix" tagged bugs next week.
I thought about an idea for a GSoC proposal and I wanna know your opinion about this idea. Inkscape currently use potrace for all raster-to-vector conversions, but potrace isn't good to work with pixel-art. Some reasearchers developed an algorithm that perform better with pixel-art: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/
My proposal would be to develop an C++ library implementing this algorithm and:
1. Create an cli program using this library 2. Integrate the feature in Inkscape using this library
The main tasks to implement this algorithm are:
- Construct a graph - Reshape the graph with the help of some heuristics defined in the paper - Extract the spline curves - Optimize the curve - Convert the B-Splines curves to Bézier curves
The library should export the curve as B-Splines and Bézier curves. This way, if Inkscape gain support for B-Splines curves in the future, it should be easy to convert the filter to generate the B-Splines instead of Bézier curves.
After finish the proposal, Inkscape should have another option to convert raster images.
I'm already used to a lot of programming languages and programming paradigms and programming skills won't be a problem for me. Graphs wouldn't be a problem for me either (I have some background on data structures and related). I would take more time to master B-Splines and Bézier curves, but I don't think this should take more than two weeks.
If I finished this proposal fast enough, I could even add extra features like add an option to pre-proccess the input with hqx filter before send it to the cited algorithm.
You can see some demos of the algorithm at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/supplementary/in... and the results are amazing.