Advanced Image/Video Matting System
Matting technology is not a new technology in film industry. Current digital matting techniques can create fabulous realistic compositing. However, most of these traditional systems require consistent background which can make these systems hard to be used by normal home users.
Advanced image/video matting system can extract foreground object layer from background scene and hence the foreground layer is able to be put onto a novel scene to create unrealistic photos, without strong constraints on background scenes. A realtime video matting system can also be used in interactive entertainment to let players feel more involved in the virtual world, just because they can actually see themselves in it.
To get that great system running, we still need to solve a lot of very hard problems. How to decrease the constraints on images? How to increase the robustness? And, how to make it faster? ... Fortunately, we have a lot of people pursuing the same object now. Visit:
http://www.alphamatting.com/, you may find what they are doing and how great their results can be. I believe that in the near future, some unbelievable systems and applications of these technology will or have already appeared in our daily life.
GrowMatting: A GPU-based Real-time Interactive Method for Image Matting
We propose a novel interactive method for image matting which is based on modern Many-Core based Graphics Processing Unit(namely GPU).
Natural image matting is one of the major challenges in modern image editing. The state of art provides matting procedure without special equipments. However, Most of current matting technologies can‘t provide immediate feedback to users. The traditional procedure of matting is in an offline mode. Users need to run the matting algorithm repeatedly and sequentially. Before users can add/modify trimap and scribbles they have to wait the program to finish first. This sequential matting mode is fairly time consuming and also may not produce the best matting results.
We propose our real-time interactive matting method implemented on a graphic processing unit(GPU), along with the following advantages: First, we designed a special approach to generate the Laplacian matrix in real-time. Secondly, the user can change or add constraints at any time during the process and get real-time feedback. With those advantages, higher quality matting results can be obtained in a shorter time.
This figure shows our typical matting procedure. With an input image, users just need to provide some scribbles in different color to mask foreground and background region. Then the program starts to calculate or propagate the alpha values. During the whole procedure, users can modify the scribbles whenever and wherever they would like. Experiments show that with our real-time interactive matting tool, high quality matting result could be obtained much faster than previous approaches in offline mode. The final result could be used to create novel composite and any other similar purpose.
Here is a video demonstration of our showcase on Monash Open Day 2010.
Click to play!