Recursive Video Matting and Denoising

In this paper, we propose a video matting method with simultaneous noise reduction based on the Unscented Kalman filter (UKF). This recursive approach extracts the alpha mattes and denoised foregrounds from noisy videos, in a unified framework. No assumptions are made about the type of motion of the camera or of the foreground object in the video. Moreover, user-specified trimaps are required only once every ten frames. In order to accurately extract information at the borders between the foreground and the background, we include a discontinuity-adaptive Markov random field (MRF) prior. It incorporates spatio-temporal information from the current and previous frame during estimation of the alpha matte as well as the foreground. Results are given on videos with real film-grain noise.