Instance Segmentation based Semantic Matting for Compositing Applications
This addresses the tedious task of manual image compositing for film making and image editing, though it appears incremental as a refinement of existing methods.
The paper tackles automatic image compositing in natural scenes with complex backgrounds by integrating instance segmentation and image matting to generate semantic mattes, showing improved performance compared to existing approaches.
Image compositing is a key step in film making and image editing that aims to segment a foreground object and combine it with a new background. Automatic image compositing can be done easily in a studio using chroma-keying when the background is pure blue or green. However, image compositing in natural scenes with complex backgrounds remains a tedious task, requiring experienced artists to hand-segment. In order to achieve automatic compositing in natural scenes, we propose a fully automated method that integrates instance segmentation and image matting processes to generate high-quality semantic mattes that can be used for image editing task. Our approach can be seen both as a refinement of existing instance segmentation algorithms and as a fully automated semantic image matting method. It extends automatic image compositing techniques such as chroma-keying to scenes with complex natural backgrounds without the need for any kind of user interaction. The output of our approach can be considered as both refined instance segmentations and alpha mattes with semantic meanings. We provide experimental results which show improved performance results as compared to existing approaches.