Pixels vs. Vectors: Presentation of Large Images on Mobile Devices

Mobile devices have become popular in recent years, and are more and more used to handle multimedia data such as digital images. Due to size and application, these devices suffer from limited resources. Especially, if large images must be displayed, the needed system resources often exceed the capabilities of a mobile device. In this paper, we want to affiliate in which circumstances the use of raster or vector images leads to advantages during the display of large images on mobile devices. Therefore, we point out limitations of current devices and derive problems that might arise from these restrictions. Taking this into account, different approaches, how to display raster and vector data on mobile devices are discussed, evaluated and substantiated by concrete tests. As we will show in an example, conclusions, when to use a certain approach or image class, can be derived easily