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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.

Color sampling based matting methods find the best known samples for foreground and background colors of unknown pixels. Such methods do not perform well if there is an overlap in the color distribution of foreground and background regions because color cannot distinguish between these regions and hence, the selected samples cannot reliably estimate the matte. Furthermore, current sampling based matting methods choose samples that are located around the boundaries of foreground and background regions. In this paper, we overcome these two problems. First, we propose texture as a feature that can complement color to improve matting by discriminating between known regions with similar colors. The contribution of texture and color is automatically estimated by analyzing the content of the image. Second, we combine local sampling with a global sampling scheme that prevents true foreground or background samples to be missed during the sample collection stage. An objective function containing color and texture components is optimized to choose the best foreground and background pair among a set of candidate pairs. Experiments are carried out on a benchmark data set and an independent evaluation of the results shows that the proposed method is ranked first among all other image matting methods.