Shared Sampling for Real-Time Alpha Matting

dc.contributor.authorGastal, Eduardo S. L.en_US
dc.contributor.authorOliveira, Manuel M.en_US
dc.date.accessioned2015-02-23T16:41:05Z
dc.date.available2015-02-23T16:41:05Z
dc.date.issued2010en_US
dc.description.abstractImage matting aims at extracting foreground elements from an image by means of color and opacity (alpha) estimation. While a lot of progress has been made in recent years on improving the accuracy of matting techniques, one common problem persisted: the low speed of matte computation. We present the first real-time matting technique for natural images and videos. Our technique is based on the observation that, for small neighborhoods, pixels tend to share similar attributes. Therefore, independently treating each pixel in the unknown regions of a trimap results in a lot of redundant work. We show how this computation can be significantly and safely reduced by means of a careful selection of pairs of background and foreground samples. Our technique achieves speedups of up to two orders of magnitude compared to previous ones, while producing high-quality alpha mattes. The quality of our results has been verified through an independent benchmark. The speed of our technique enables, for the first time, real-time alpha matting of videos, and has the potential to enable a new class of exciting applications.en_US
dc.description.number2en_US
dc.description.seriesinformationComputer Graphics Forumen_US
dc.description.volume29en_US
dc.identifier.doi10.1111/j.1467-8659.2009.01627.xen_US
dc.identifier.issn1467-8659en_US
dc.identifier.pages575-584en_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8659.2009.01627.xen_US
dc.publisherThe Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltden_US
dc.titleShared Sampling for Real-Time Alpha Mattingen_US
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