I don't know much about bitmaps, so you may get a better answer from someone else, however here are a few comments. The problem appears to be related to the fact that this was originally an embedded png image. The size of the image was 1 pixel by 1 pixel. This is shown in the svg tag
<image width="1" height="1" transform="matrix(1,0,0,-1,0,1)" xlink:href="data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAA4AAAABCAYAAADuHp8EAAAABHNCSVQICAgIfAhkiAAAAERJREFUCJkBOQDG/wG2aij/FxsXABQgJQAUKCAAABMaAAoVHAAACkUAAAAAAM4AzgDM8eUAus3tABvtKQCXxugA/cioAGJcEJMX3vuCAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC" id="image20862" />
Then the image was expanded by a factor of 465 horizontally and 25 vertically. This is shown in the element transform="matrix(465.32309,0,0,25.338759,163.05532,330.72791)"
During this expansion, Inkscape chose to interpret the color gradations in a discrete way as 14 separate colors, while the postscript file apparently interpreted these as a continuous color scale. I think the Inkscape interpretation is probably the correct one; however, the way to avoid this in the future would be to import a full size png image that does not need to be scaled.
cheers, Alvin Penner
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