Artists may soon have at their disposal a new MIT-developed tool that could help them create digital characters, logos, and other graphics more quickly and easily. Many digital artists rely on image vectorization, a technique that converts a pixel-based image into an image comprising groupings of clearly defined shapes. In this technique, points in the image are connected by lines or curves to construct the shapes. Among other perks, vectorized images maintain the same resolution when either enlarged or shrunk down. To vectorize an image, artists often have to hand-trace each stroke using specialized software, such as Adobe Illustrator, which is laborious. Another option is using automated vectorization tools in those software packages. Often, however, these tools lead to numerous tracing errors that take more time to rectify by hand. The main culprit: mismatches at intersections where curves and lines meet. In a paper being published in the journal ACM Transactions on Graphics, MIT researchers detail a new automated vectorization algorithm that traces intersections without error, greatly reducing the need for manual revision. Powering the tool is a modified version of a new mathematical technique in the computer-graphics community, called “frame fields,” used to guide tracing of paths around curves, sharp corners, and messy parts of drawings where many lines intersect....

We’re approaching the limit of how small transistors can get. As a result, over the past decade researchers have been working to find other ways to improve performance so that the computer industry can continue to innovate....

Programming has fascinated senior computer science and engineering major Walter Menendez since he was 10, and he first got his hands on the Mega Man franchise of video games. One game, in particular, features sentient avatars that could traverse a physical representation of the Internet, a virtual world in which “life is the same as technology,” Menendez recalls. Since that early exposure to augmented reality, it’s been a field he’s chased — and one that he finally got his hands on as an undergraduate at MIT. Before he could get to the good stuff, though, Menendez had to make the rounds through basic programming and Web development. During his freshman year, he worked alongside then-graduate student Anthony DeVincenzi on a project to make data more social and accessible. As part of the Tangible Media Group in the MIT Media Laboratory, Menendez helped build a Web app where people could upload geospatial information — such as the location and impact of an earthquake, drought, or wildfire — onto an interactive map....

In music, “portamento” is a term that’s been used for hundreds of years, referring to the effect of gliding a note at one pitch into a note of a lower or higher pitch. But only instruments that can continuously vary in pitch — such as the human voice, string instruments, and trombones — can pull off the effect. Now an MIT student has invented a novel algorithm that produces a portamento effect between any two audio signals in real-time. In experiments, the algorithm seamlessly merged various audio clips, such as a piano note gliding into a human voice, and one song blending into another. His paper describing the algorithm won the “best student paper” award at the recent International Conference on Digital Audio Effects. The algorithm relies on “optimal transport,” a geometry-based framework that determines the most efficient ways to move objects — or data points — between multiple origin and destination configurations. Formulated in the 1700s, the framework has been applied to supply chains, fluid dynamics, image alignment, 3-D modeling, computer graphics, and more....