FuzzyMatte: A Computationally Efficient Scheme for Interactive Matting

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an online interactive matting algorithm, which we call FuzzyMatte. Our framework is based on computing the fuzzy connectedness (FC) [20] from each unknown pixel to the known foreground and background. FC effectively captures the adjacency and similarity between image elements and can be efficiently computed using the strongest connected path searching algorithm. The final alpha value at each pixel can then be calculated from its FC. While many previous methods need to completely recompute the matte when new inputs are provided, FuzzyMatte effectively integrates these new inputs with the previously estimated matte by efficiently recomputing the FC value for a small subset of pixels. Thus, the computational overhead between each iteration of the refinement is significantly reduced. We demonstrate FuzzyMatte on a wide range of images. We show that FuzzyMatte updates the matte in an online interactive setting and generates high quality matte for complex images.