Images are commonly represented as bitmaps, and it is crucial to identify intrinsic geometric features of objects in such an unstructured format. Vectorization is a popular technique that converts raster images into a collection of parametric curves and surfaces, encoding the input's prominent features and yielding resolution-independent representations. In this talk, we propose variational principles for image vectorization along with effective algorithms based on the affine shortening flow and region merging, generalizing a steepest gradient descent for the reduced Mumford–Shah functional. We will also present recent applications in shape classification and historical glyph preservation.