Near-Real-Time Image Matting with Known Background

This paper presents a novel matting algorithm for handling cases where foreground objects are in front of complex (non-smooth) but known background. The algorithm is based on a Poisson equation that takes the gradient of the known background into consideration. The quantitative evaluation based on ground truth shows that the matting results obtained using the proposed algorithm is more accurate than the ones generated by the global Poisson matting. The proposed algorithm is also optimized for parallel processing and runs in near-real-time on programmable graphics hardware.