Natural Image Matting

Abstract

Matte pulling - generating greyscale images which indicate segmentation of images into elements with subpixel accuracy and where blur causes pixels to be a mixture of elements - has received attention in recent years. Many of the algorithms are too slow or too unpredictable to be of practical use in motion picture Post-production. Assessing the performance of different algorithms is also a complex task. This paper presents an optimisation which can be applied to many algorithms in order to allow them to run at interactive speeds, introduces a new algorithm based on Colour Lines, and presents a technique which can be used as a formal test-bench to measure the performance of matte algorithms.