A Matte-less, Variational Approach to Automatic Scene Compositing

In this paper, we consider the problem of compositing a scene from multiple images. Multiple images, for example, can be obtained by varying the exposure of the camera, by changing the object at focus, or by simply sampling a video sequence at arbitrary time instants. We develop this problem in an optimization framework and then adopt a variational approach to derive a generalized algorithm which will be able to solve diverse applications depending on the nature of the input images. Our approach has distinct advantages over the existing digital compositing techniques, such as alpha matting and alpha blending, which require an explicit preparation of the matte while there is no such requirement in the proposed technique. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach through results from diverse applications in computer vision.