Strokes-matting method based on sample search

Image matting plays an important role in image editing and computer vision. Alpha matting is to solve the problem of softly extracting the foreground object from an image. The problem is inherently ill-posed. Existing matting approaches usually use a given trimap to estimate the alpha value for each unknown pixel. So the results rely on not only the different algorithms, but also the given trimap. In this paper, we present an easy interactive matting method based on the sample search matting. Users only require drawing some strokes or points on the foreground and background to extract the foreground object. This method can easily collect the samples available to compute the alpha value for the whole image pixels.