An alternative region-forming frontend selected by --clustering watershed
(the color_mode field is replaced by clustering: color-cluster | bw |
watershed across CLI, Rust, Python, and Node — it selects the algorithm,
not a color space).
The algorithm is the watershed hierarchy by volume on the 4-adjacency
pixel graph, implemented from the papers:
Cousty, Bertrand, Najman, Couprie, "Watershed Cuts: Minimum Spanning
Forests and the Drop of Water Principle", IEEE TPAMI 31(8), 2009.
Najman, Cousty, Perret, "Playing with Kruskal", ISMM 2013.
Edge weights are the max per-channel color difference between adjacent
pixels (no gradient image); a counting-sorted Kruskal pass builds the
binary partition tree as a flat parents array; a leaves-to-root pass
computes subtree area and volume; each merge's persistence (the volume of
the smaller side, plateau-corrected) becomes its MST edge's saliency; and
cutting the hierarchy is single-linkage over MST edges below the cut
level. Watershed cuts label every pixel — no watershed-line pixel class —
so the output is a strict, gapless partition that drops straight into
both stacked and cutout modes. Integer arithmetic and flat u32 arrays
throughout; deterministic across platforms; ~66 ms on a 1400x775 photo.
The one dial, --watershed-detail (0..=255), maps exponentially to a
target region count (each +25.5 doubles it) since the persistence
distribution is far too skewed for a linear threshold. filter_speckle
absorbs undersized basins into their most color-similar neighbour rather
than dropping them, preserving the partition. The largest region is
emitted first as a solid full-canvas background layer so stacked mode
keeps its seam-free overdraw; the mosaic flatten is unaffected.
Tests: partition invariant (disjoint masks tiling the canvas), detail
monotonicity, min-area absorption, determinism, watershed cases in the
pipeline/golden suites, stacked-vs-cutout interior equivalence, a
watershed seam test, and SegmentKey coverage for the new params.
New crates/vtracer-py (pyo3 + maturin, abi3) wrapping the vtracer framework.
Rather than a thin CLI-style wrapper, it exposes a mutable `Config` class with
named properties and `bw`/`poster`/`photo` preset constructors, plus three
input paths — `convert_file`, `convert_bytes` (encoded image, optional format),
and `convert_pixels` (raw RGBA8) — available as `Config` methods and
module-level functions. Palette is a list of `#rrggbb` strings; bad inputs
raise ValueError.
The core crate stays pure: image decoding lives here. The crate is excluded
from the cargo workspace (pyo3 extension-module cdylibs don't link libpython,
which breaks `cargo test` at the root) and is built with maturin. Ships a
vtracer.pyi type stub. README updated.
Chris Tsang