Automatic and accurate image matting

Abstract

This paper presents a modified spectral matting to obtain automatic and accurate image matting. Spectral matting is the state-of-the-art image matting and also a milestone in theoretic matting research. However, using spectral matting without user guides, the accuracy is usually low. The proposed modified spectral matting effectively raises the accuracy. In the proposed modified spectral matting, the palette-based component classification is proposed to obtain the reliable foreground and background components. In contrast to the spectral matting, based on these reliable foreground and background components, the accuracy of obtained alpha matte is greatly increased. Experimental results show that the proposed method has better performance than the spectral matting. Therefore, the proposed image matting is very suitable for image and video editing. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.