The University of California San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering has doubled the size of its Accelerating Interdisciplinary Research Collaborations for Early-Career Faculty program, which it launched last year. The big-picture goal of the program
Differentiable Vector Graphics Rasterization for Editing and Learning
We introduce a differentiable rasterizer for vector graphics that bridges the raster and vector domains through
backpropagation. Differentiable rasterization enables many novel vector graphics applications.
(a) Interactive editing that locally optimizes for image-space metrics, such as
opacity, under geometric constraints. (b) A new painterly rendering technique by fitting random
Bézier curves to a target image. (c) Improving state of art image vectorization
result. (d) Editing vector graphics using potentially non-differentiable
raster image processing operators, such as seam carving [Avidan et al. 2007] for image retargeting. (e) Training a variational autoencoder to generate vector MNIST digits and adding stylized strokes as postprocessing.