Interactive Trimap Generation for Digital Matting Based on Single-Sample Learning

Image matting refers to the task of estimating the foreground of images, which is an important problem in image processing. Recently, trimap generation has attracted considerable attention because designing a trimap for every image is labor-intensive. In this paper, a two-step algorithm is proposed to generate trimaps. To use the proposed algorithm, users must only provide some clicks (foreground clicks and background clicks), which are employed as the input to generate a binary mask. One-shot learning technique achieves remarkable progress on semantic segmentation, we extend this technique to perform the binary mask prediction task. The mask is further used to predict the trimap using image dilation. Extensive experiments were performed to evaluate the proposed algorithm. Experimental results show that the trimaps generated using the proposed algorithm are visually similar to the user-annotated ones. Comparing with the interactive matting algorithms, the proposed algoritm is less labor-intensive than trimap-based matting algorithm and achieved more accuate results than scribble-based matting algorithm.