Vector field fitting for real-time environment matting of transparent objects

The major drawback of real-time environment matting method is that the extracted environment matte data often contains significant amount of noise and errors. Although some filtering methods have been employed to remove the noise and obtain acceptable composition results, they are incapable of removing potential errors. In this paper, we first establish a light motion field to better describe the environmental matting effect of transparent objects and propose a new vector field fitting algorithm to simultaneously remove both noise and errors in the extracted matte data by using energy minimization approach. Experimental results show that our method is less sensitive to noise and error and can generate perceptually better composition results than the existing real-time environment matting approaches.