Thank you for the information. When not using an image layer, the menu item "View as SVG..." exports a GENUINE SVG file (not just an encoded pixel image embedded in an SVG file) to the temp directory. This is a very useful feature!
Do you plan to add a feature (or a plugin) to VECTORIZE a pixel image in the future? Maybe in IEVision?
I don't think methods to convert bitmaps to vectors are very effective. You can use use some functions such as line and edge detection, which can be output as line layers and thus SVG.