A Closed-Form Solution to Natural Image Matting

Interactive digital matting, the process of extracting a foreground object from an image based on limited user input, is an important task in image and video editing. From a computer vision perspective, this task is extremely challenging because it is massively ill-posed -- at each pixel we must estimate the foreground and the background colors, as well as the foreground opacity ("alpha matte") from a single color measurement. Current approaches either restrict the estimation to a small part of the image, estimating foreground and background colors based on nearby pixels where they are known, or perform iterative nonlinear estimation by alternating foreground and background color estimation with alpha…

• HU
  Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• IA
  Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities
• IS
  Israel Science Foundation
• CS
  Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology