An improved Bayesian matting method based on image statistic characteristics

Image matting is an important task in image and video editing and has been studied for more than 30 years. In this paper we propose an improved interactive matting method. Starting from a coarse user-guided trimap, we first perform a color estimation based on texture and color information and use the result to refine the original trimap. Then with the new trimap, we apply soft matting process which is improved Bayesian matting with smoothness constraints. Experimental results on natural image show that this method is useful, especially for the images have similar texture feature in the background or the images which is hard to give a precise trimap.