Fast natural image matting in perceptual color space

This paper proposes a fast natural image matting method in perceptual color space. Natural image matting is usually composed of three steps: region segmenting, color estimating and alpha estimating. Our matting approach uses a practical model to estimate the foreground and background color of a given pixel in unknown regions. It avoids complex computing and decreases computational cost significantly. A new alpha estimating method in perceptual color space is introduced to compute the alpha value correctly and effectively. We separate the chroma and intensity information of a color Lind emphasize the more significant one. Our method works well on different perceptual color spaces, extracts foreground objects much faster, and produces modestly better mattes than the Bayesian approach. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.