Differentiable Vector Graphics Rasterization for Editing and Learning

We introduce a differentiable rasterizer that bridges the vector graphics and raster image domains, enabling powerful raster-based loss functions, optimization procedures, and machine learning techniques to edit and generate vector content. We observe that vector graphics rasterization is differenti...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Li, Tzu-Mao, Lukac, Mike, Gharbi, Michael, Ragan-Kelley, Jonathan
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: ACM|SIGGRAPH Asia 2020 Technical Papers 2025
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/158158
Description
Summary:We introduce a differentiable rasterizer that bridges the vector graphics and raster image domains, enabling powerful raster-based loss functions, optimization procedures, and machine learning techniques to edit and generate vector content. We observe that vector graphics rasterization is differentiable after pixel prefiltering. Our differentiable rasterizer offers two prefiltering options: an analytical prefiltering technique and a multisampling anti-aliasing technique. The analytical variant is faster but can suffer from artifacts such as conflation. The multisampling variant is still efficient, and can render high-quality images while computing unbiased gradients for each pixel with respect to curve parameters. We demonstrate that our rasterizer enables new applications, including a vector graphics editor guided by image metrics, a painterly rendering algorithm that fits vector primitives to an image by minimizing a deep perceptual loss function, new vector graphics editing algorithms that exploit well-known image processing methods such as seam carving, and deep generative models that generate vector content from raster-only supervision under a VAE or GAN training objective.