Trimap Segmentation for Fast and User-Friendly Alpha Matting

Abstract. Given an image, digital matting consists in extracting a foreground element from the background. Standard methods are initialized with a trimap, a partition of the image into three regions: a definite foreground, a definite background, and a blended region where pixels are considered as a mixture of foreground and background colors. Recovering these colors and the proportion of mixture between both is an under-constrained inverse problem, sensitive to its initialization: one has to specify an accurate trimap, leaving undetermined as few pixels as possible. First, we propose a new segmentation scheme to extract an accurate trimap from just a coarse indication of some background and/or foreground pixels. Standard statistical models are used for the foreground and the background, while a specific one is designed for the blended region. The segmentation of the three regions is conducted simultaneously by an iterative Graph Cut based optimization scheme. This user-friendly trim...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: VLSM
• Authors: Olivier Juan, Renaud Keriven
• Keywords: Accurate Trimap, Background And/or Foreground, Blended Region, Computer Vision, VLSM 2005