Vector Graphics

Vector graphics is the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and polygons, which are all based upon mathematical equations to represent images in computer graphics.

This is a vector graphic.

Example showing effect of vector graphics versus raster graphics. The original vector-based illustration is at the left. The upper-right image illustrates magnification of 7x as a vector image. The lower-right image illustrates the same magnification as a bitmap image. Raster images are based on pixels and thus scale with loss of clarity, while vector-based images can be scaled indefinitely without degrading.

A vector graphic is made up of points in space called vectors. The advantage of vector graphics, in comparison to bitmaps, is that it can be rescaled without lowering the quality. Another advantage is that Vector graphics take up less memory space than bitmaps. Many modern graphics programs can create vector images. Good examples would be Photoshop and Macromedia Flash.

Vectorising an image is a good way to take uneccesary detail from an image.

Vectorising is good for removing unnecessary detail from a photograph. This is especially useful for information graphics or line art. (Images were converted to JPEG for display on this page.)

Images: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics

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