Exact vectors from your logo, in your browser.
Inkvec traces logos, icons and flat artwork to SVG the way an artist would draw them: edges where the anti-aliasing says they are, circles as circles, one clean path per colour, gradients as gradients. Inkvec Studio Lite is the whole editor, running here as WebAssembly on your own processor. Nothing is uploaded.
Best on a laptop or desktop screen. Inside the Studio, Full screen is in the top bar.
What's new in 0.3.1
With editability on, a trace is drawn more the way artists draw, and on a JPEG the edges land closer to the artist's. 0.3.0 brought traces closer to what the artist drew in every mode and condition, and much closer on the resized JPEGs and screenshots logos usually arrive as.
Every edit has to pay for itself
With editability on, a smooth join, a node at an extreme or an arc rewritten as cubics is kept only when the numbers it saves outweigh the fit it costs. The bonus each kind of edit receives was learned from the artists' own files. Against the plain trace, edge placement improves by up to 0.9%, and the drawing is 8 to 9% closer to the artists' by a battery of 28 drawing statistics.
Edges on a JPEG
The boundary solve fitted edges to the codec's ringing. On a lossy image that is not restored it is now skipped. On icons resized and saved at quality 80, edges sit 7% closer to the artist's and Quality's dE00 is 5.6% lower.
Closer to the artist's file
Quality's colour difference from the artist's own file (dE00) is 12.5% lower at 128 px, 12.1% at 512 px and 15.2% at 512 px on an opaque ground; Fast's is 9 to 12% lower. Quality also writes fewer parameters: 1.32 per artist parameter at 512 px opaque, down from 1.96.
JPEGs and screenshots
A JPEG's colour bleeds two or three pixels across every edge. Those halos now go back to the inks they lie between instead of becoming shapes of their own. On icons resized and saved at quality 80, Quality's dE00 is 10.4% lower and Fast writes 4.13 parameters per artist parameter, down from 7.29.
Whole shapes, under what covers them
A shape partly hidden by another used to come back as the sliver that shows. Quality now draws it whole: the simplest shape that leaves every visible pixel as it was. A letter's counter is cut out of its glyph instead of painted over it, and each fill is one compound path.
Strokes by default
Where a shape is a centreline and one width, Quality writes it as a stroked path whenever that is the shorter description at as good a fit. It had been opt-in; it now costs about a sixth more time on a 512 px trace.
Nodes where a designer puts them
Nodes sit at a curve's horizontal and vertical extremes, with the handles on the axis, where the fit prefers them. With editability on, a circular arc becomes cubics cut at its extremes and the joins are smooth, the way drawing tools write curves.
Proved, then checked
A pixel's coverage is an area, so a column of pixels gives a boundary's exact mean height, whatever its slope. That theory is machine-checked in Lean, and results the theorems speak about are accepted only by checkers generated from the proofs.
Full list, with the measurements behind each figure: the changelog.
Before and after, with the geometry showing
Every example in one scrolling panel: real brand logos, the benchmark's cases and more icons and emoji, each rendered from its source file at 1024 px on white and traced from that raster by Inkvec (the current build) and by the other engines. Pick one to open it. The raster on the left, a trace on the right, moving together as you zoom. Switch the right side between engines, or the view to a wipe or an A/B flick. Anchors shows every on-curve point; Handles adds each curve's control points with their tangents.
Inkvec vs the field
Trademark notice & nominative fair-use disclaimer: All third-party trademarks, logos, brand names, and company marks displayed in this showcase are the property of their respective owners. Their depiction is strictly for nominative, non-commercial educational benchmarking and comparative vectorization demonstration. Inkvec and LogoLabs are not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by these trademark holders.
How it works
Inkvec decides the geometry from the evidence in the pixels. It finds the inks by minimum description length, builds a planar map where every boundary is shared by exactly two shapes so there are never gaps, solves every boundary at once against an exact coverage render of the image, then fits lines, arcs, curves, circles and gradients priced in parameters. The result carries the artist's structure: a word is one path, a circle is a <circle>, and the number of coordinates follows the artwork rather than a tolerance slider.
Inkvec Studio Lite is the desktop app's own interface and code: the Studio's Rust core compiled to WebAssembly, run in a Web Worker on a pool of threads, one per core (where the browser allows it: a page opened in its own tab does). The trained denoiser for JPEG and screenshot damage is downloaded once, in the background as the Studio opens, and runs on your GPU through ONNX Runtime Web.
Inkvec Studio for the desktop
The same editor for Windows, macOS and Linux, with folders of images traced in one batch, the inkvec command line, the right-click menu and traces up to 16384 px. Free and open source (Apache-2.0).