Real-time video matting based on bilayer segmentation

Abstract

Most current video matting methods perform off-line with a high calculation cost and require many user inputs for multiple key frames. In this paper, we present an online video matting method that runs in real-time based on bilayer segmentation. For the first step of the method, we introduce an accurate bilayer segmentation method for extracting the foreground region from the background using color likelihood propagation. For the second step, we perform alpha-matting based on the segmentation result. To enable real-time processing, we modify the conventional Bayesian matting method by using down-sampling and smart initialization, which increase the calculation speed by 5 times while maintaining the quality. Experimental results on various test sequences show the effectiveness of our method. © Springer-Verlag 2010.