Multiview foreground extraction and composition to multiview background using trimap sharing for natural 3D scene generation

Digital matting for extracting foreground objects from an image is an important process to generate special effects in the movie industry and the broadcasting center. Recently, a digital matting algorithm has been developed to create an alpha matte using a well-focused image generated from multiview images. However, this method could generate only a single-view alpha matte, even though it used multiple cameras. In this article, we propose a new estimation scheme for multiview alpha mattes by sharing the trimap of the reference view. Furthermore, we use the motion vector to update the trimap for video matting. After we extract foreground objects from all view images, we composite the foreground objects with the corresponding background images captured in the same multiview camera arrangement. Experimental results demonstrate that multiview composite images can generate reasonably natural 3D views through the stereoscopic monitor. VC 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 20, 285–293, 2010; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary. com. DOI 10.1002/ima.20251