Two-phase approach for multi-view object extraction

In this paper, we propose an automatic method to extract a foreground object captured from multiple viewpoints. We consider the foreground object is within the visual hull of camera field of views. By exploring the multi-view geometric relationship and color measurements of the input images, we can estimate the foreground segmentations as well as their fractional boundaries. To facilitate efficient computation and high quality mattes, we adopt a two-phase approach. The first phase of our algorithm provides quick and rough binary segmentations of the foreground object using graph-cut; the second phase refines the segmentation boundaries using matting. Our result is the high quality alpha mattes of the foreground object consistently across all different viewpoints. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method using challenging examples.