Weblog Home Web site's Home Clip art Search Clker.com – Available downloads RSS

« Apache hanging once in a while – caught the culprit
Now you can edit your uploads »

Clipart tracer: New feature coming soon…

For the previous months, I’ve been putting my spare time towards a new feature that I believe will greatly help adding free vector images. The feature is an online tool, that helps tracing raster images. It works by uploading your raster image, then tracing it online to produce the vector in a semi-automated way.

There are many useful tools available now, however none of them is able to produce what I percieve as a clipart. The tools that I regularly use are potrace (from inside inkscape) and sometimes vectormagic. The problem with both is that if you try vectorizing a colored image they will produce a fuzzy blurry svg, which does not look anywhere close to a clip art.

I had excellent results with potrace on lineart images, and I had no luck with colored ones.

This online tool solves a big part of the colored images problem. Some of the test results are here (showing both the raster and the vectorized result):

Good results:

Rib cage:

Double cherry:


Man wearing topper:
Lady answering phone:


Unsuccessful / Bad results:
1967 hair style:
It doesn’t work well either with lineart. potrace is a better candidate if you have lineart images.
All the raster images are in public domain. The lady answering the phone was obtained from NCI (national cancer institute website), the rest from commons.wikimedia.org .
Those images resemble what I call clip arts more than the output of vector magic or adobe illustrator. The tool produces an outline, which I colored using inkscape – so there is no expectation about coloring now :) .
Currently, I’m adding the required services on the website to communicate with the component and as soon as they’re done I’ll have it up for everyone to play with.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 10:26 pm and is filed under clker.com, development, news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


5 Responses to “Clipart tracer: New feature coming soon…”

  1. Mohit @ Images to EPS Says:
    June 16th, 2009 at 11:39 pm

    You are surely working on a very interesting project. The examples that you have shown here indicate that to a great extent you have achieved your goal. Good luck!!

  2. anistock Says:
    July 17th, 2009 at 7:37 am

    Interested in this article, I am working with a research unit from a university, they have developed a prototype piece of software using animation to execute this type of effect on images and animation.

    I’ll keep looking at your posts and will share details of software when they want to reveal it to public

  3. Mohamed Ibrahim Says:
    July 17th, 2009 at 8:38 am

    It is not really an effect, by which I mean it is not a raster filter since the result is a vector image. If you click on the pictures and on the vector results you can see them live on the website.

  4. anna Says:
    November 11th, 2009 at 4:13 pm

    I cannot get the sign in to work, it keeps saying time has expired what is going on and why can;t I sign up on your site for the crayon tool? thanks for a reply

  5. Mohamed Ibrahim Says:
    November 12th, 2009 at 12:31 pm

    I fixed that yesterday. Hopefully there won’t be anymore troubles with signing up.

Leave a Reply
11,252 spam comments
blocked by
Akismet