Real-time automatic chroma-key matting using perceptual analysis and prediction

This paper presents a novel mechanism for automatically matting monochromatic background images and videos in real-time. The proposed mechanism simulates the process of human perception on isolating foreground elements in a given scene. The perceptual analysis is performed on optimized hue, saturation, lightness and chroma from CIECAM02 color appearance model, which has the best overall performance across the tested data sets. The foreground and background sample-pairs for alpha estimation are adaptively predicted based on the prior analysis rather than direct sampling. To achieve real-time performance, the entire procedures are optimized for parallel processing on the GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). The qualitative evaluation shows that our determined alpha mattes and foreground colors especially in large seemingly translucent areas are more acceptable by human eyes. And the quantitative comparison between our mechanism and other existing approaches also validates the advantage in speed and quality.