Multi-View Image Matting and Compositing Using Trimap Sharing for Natural 3-D Scene Generation

Digital matting for extracting foreground objects from an image is an important process to generate special effects in the movie industry and the broadcasting center. Recently, a digital matting algorithm has been developed to create an alpha matte using a well-focused image generated from multi-view images. However, this method could generate only a single-view alpha matte, even though it employed multiple cameras. In this paper, we propose a new estimation scheme for multi-view alpha mattes by sharing the trimap of the reference view. After we extract foreground objects from all view images, we composite the foreground objects with the corresponding background images captured from the same multi-view camera arrangement. Experimental results demonstrate that multi-view composite images can generate reasonably natural 3-D views through the stereoscopic monitor.