Sparse Coding for Alpha Matting

作者：Johnson Jubin^*; Varnousfaderani Ehsan Shahrian^*; Cholakkal Hisham^*; Rajan Deepu^*

来源：IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2016, 25(7): 3032-3043.

DOI：10.1109/TIP.2016.2555705

• Alpha matting
• graph model
• sparse coding

Existing color sampling-based alpha matting methods use the compositing equation to estimate alpha at a pixel from the pairs of foreground (F) and background (B) samples. The quality of the matte depends on the selected (F, B) pairs. In this paper, the matting problem is reinterpreted as a sparse coding of pixel features, wherein the sum of the codes gives the estimate of the alpha matte from a set of unpaired F and B samples. A non-parametric probabilistic segmentation provides a certainty measure on the pixel belonging to foreground or background, based on which a dictionary is formed for use in sparse coding. By removing the restriction to conform to (F, B) pairs, this method allows for better alpha estimation from multiple F and B samples. The same framework is extended to videos, where the requirement of temporal coherence is handled effectively. Here, the dictionary is formed by samples from multiple frames. A multi-frame graph model, as opposed to a single image as for image matting, is proposed that can be solved efficiently in closed form. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on a benchmark dataset are provided to show that the proposed method outperforms the current stateoftheart in image and video matting.

• 出版日期2016-7
• 单位南阳理工学院