Binarising AI Line Art For Vector Traceability: What Survived The Adobe CSV Test

Description and use

Problem: Soft edges in AI line art produce gray halos that trigger Adobe rejections and inflate vector trace node counts. Solution: Convert to grayscale, apply Otsu thresholding, resize with nearest‑neighbor, verify node counts, and generate correct CSV metadata. Result: 39 of 40 assets passed review.

Problem

AI‑generated line art contains soft edges that produce gray halos, causing Adobe review rejections and excessive anchor points in vector traces.

Outcome

Implemented a pipeline that binarises AI line art using Otsu’s thresholding, resizes with nearest‑neighbor, verifies node counts, and generates correct CSV metadata, resulting in 39 successful submissions out of 40 assets.

Workflow

• Convert image to grayscale and compute histogram
• If histogram is bimodal, apply Otsu’s method to determine threshold; otherwise use fixed threshold 160
• Binarise image using determined threshold
• Resize image with nearest‑neighbor only after binarisation
• Verify vector trace node count is in low hundreds per icon
• Generate platform‑specific CSV metadata with correct header
• Track submissions to avoid duplicates
• Package and submit final assets

Evidence

I lost a full day of batch output to a single grayscale pixel.

Source

Adobe's review flagged a chunk of them for artifacts in the line work.

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After binarising at the right threshold: 312 nodes versus 1,847 nodes raw trace.

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The threshold is not 128… I burned a whole render cycle learning that.

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One process at a time, never fan out image jobs in parallel on a single core.

Source