Natural Image Matting with Total Variation Regularisation

Image mating is the process of isolating the foreground in images and video. This task is challenging as it is severely under constrained. At each pixel we must estimate the foreground and background colour and the blending between them (alpha value). Most approaches calculate an affinity matrix and then minimise a system of linear equations to find the alpha matte. In this work we propose an extension to this class of affinity based matting techniques by introducing a Total Variation constraint over the alpha matte. We show that our Total Variation Regularisation method improves results in the presence of hard boundaries, gaps and holes.