SVG rendering for Internet imaging

The SVG (scalable vector graphics) standard allows representing complex graphical scenes by a collection of graphic vectorial-based primitives, offering several advantages with respect to classical raster images such as: scalability, resolution independence, etc. In this paper we present a full comparison between some advanced raster to SVG algorithms: SWaterG, SVGenie, SVGWave and some commercial tools. SWaterG works by a watershed decomposition coupled with some ad-hoc heuristics, SVGenie and SVGWave use a polygonalization based respectively on data dependent and wavelet triangulation. The results obtained by SWaterG, SVGenie and SVGWave are satisfactory both in terms of perceptual measured quality and compression ratio.