Improving Color Modeling for Alpha Matting

By Christoph Rhemann, Carsten Rother, and Margrit Gelautz

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of extracting an alpha matte from a single photograph given a user-defined trimap. A crucial part of this task is the color modeling step where for each pixel the optimal alpha value, together with its confidence, is estimated individually. This forms the data term of the objective function. It comprises of three steps: (i) Collecting a candidate set of potential fore- and background colors; (ii) Selecting high confidence samples from the candidate set; (iii) Estimating a sparsity prior to remove blurry artifacts. We introduce novel ideas for each of these steps and show that our approach considerably improves over state-of-the-art techniques by evaluating it on a large database of 54 images with known high-quality ground truth.

Reference

C. Rhemann, C. Rother, M. Gelautz: "Improving Color Modeling for Alpha Matting"; Talk: British Machine Vision Conference BMVC 2008, Ledds, UK; 09-01-2008; in: "Proceedings of the British Machine Vision Conference 2008", (2008), 1155 - 1164.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{TUW-169054,     author = {Rhemann, Christoph and Rother, Carsten and Gelautz, Margrit},     title = {Improving Color Modeling for Alpha Matting},     booktitle = {Proceedings of the British Machine Vision Conference 2008},     year = {2008},     pages = {1155--1164},     url = {http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_169054.pdf},     keywords = {Image matting},     note = {Vortrag: British Machine Vision Conference BMVC 2008, Ledds, UK; 2008-09-01} } Click into the text area and press Ctrl+A/Ctrl+C or ⌘+A/⌘+C to copy the BibTeX into your clipboard… or download the BibTeX.