Matting and compositing for Fresnel reflection on wavy surfaces

Abstract

This paper introduces a framework that can extract an alpha matte from a single image with Fresnel reflection, and that can composite other objects with the image such that plausible reflections are included. Our method handles reflections in a plane with small undulations, for example, a water surface with waves or a glossy tabletop. During the matting stage, our method first estimates the transmission color, which is assumed to be uniform, and then calculates a reflection image and alpha matte based on user markups. However, accurate extraction of the matte becomes challenging when a plane has small undulations because these create perturbations in the matte We therefore propose a filter that can refine the matte effectively. In the compositing stage, the reflection of a composited object is synthesized by ray tracing in real time. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through comparisons with ground-truth data and results using natural images as inputs. © 2012 The Author(s).