Matting refers to the problem of accurate foreground estimation in images and video. It is one of the key techniques in many image editing and film production applications, thus has been extensively studied in the literature. With the recent advances of digital cameras, using matting techniques to create novel composites or facilitate other editing tasks has gained increasing interests from both professionals as well as consumers. Consequently, various matting techniques and systems have been proposed to try to efficiently extract high quality mattes from both still images and video sequences. This survey provides a comprehensive review of existing image and video matting algorithms and systems, with an emphasis on the advanced techniques that have been recently proposed. The first part of the survey is focused on image matting. The fundamental techniques shared by many image matting algorithms, such as color sampling methods and matting affinities, are first analyzed. Image mattin...
Jue Wang, Michael F. Cohen