Automatic Image Matting fusing Time-of-Flight and Color Cameras Data Streams

Piercarlo Dondi, Luca Lombardi, Andrea La Rosa, Luigi Cinque

Keywords: Time-of-Flight Camera, Matting, Video Streams Integration, CUDA

Abstract: In this paper we present a new approach for automatic image matting. Image matting is a set of techniques related to the accurate classification of background and foreground in image and video sequences. It is not a new problem, matting techniques are currently a prerequisite of several applications of image and video editing, but almost all existing solutions require an interactive step with a human expert. Our proposal solves automatically the problem by the fusion of two different video streams: the color one, coming from a standard RGB camera and the depth one, produced by a Time-of-Flight device. The proposed method extends the Soft Scissors interactive algorithm: the main novelties of our approach are the complete automation of the matting process and the computational efficiency, obtained by the porting of the most computational intensive sections of algorithm on a CUDA architecture.