Volume matting: object tracking based matting tool

Digital matting, whose goal is to extract only an interesting foreground component from arbitrary and natural background regions, plays an important role in a variety of areas such as computer vision, graphics and so on. Especially, digital matting has been widely used in film production lately for providing an efficient way of dealing with a complicated composition. However, it is hard to generate a perfect matte from a given image without any prior information because the matting problem is intrinsically ill-posed. This prior information is usually fed by means of a trimap or scribbles. Hence, when extracting foreground objects from any sequent images with the still-image matting method, the works would be definitely laborious and time-consuming. To overcome these problems, video matting of the process of pulling a foreground regions from sequent images has been introduced. For instance, the video matting method proposed by [Chuang et al. 2002] leverages a bayesian technique for image matting and an optical flow algorithm to estimate the trimap flow.