Image meshing via hierarchical optimization

Abstract

Vector graphic, as a kind of geometric representation of raster images, has many advantages, e.g., definition independence and editing facility. A popular way to convert raster images into vector graphics is image meshing, the aim of which is to find a mesh to represent an image as faithfully as possible. For traditional meshing algorithms, the crux of the problem resides mainly in the high non-linearity and non-smoothness of the objective, which makes it difficult to find a desirable optimal solution. To ameliorate this situation, we present a hierarchical optimization algorithm solving the problem from coarser levels to finer ones, providing initialization for each level with its coarser ascent. To further simplify the problem, the original non-convex problem is converted to a linear least squares one, and thus becomes convex, which makes the problem much easier to solve. A dictionary learning framework is used to combine geometry and topology elegantly. Then an alternating scheme is employed to solve both parts. Experiments show that our algorithm runs fast and achieves better results than existing ones for most images.