Weighted color and texture sample selection for image matting

Color information is leveraged by color sampling-based matting methods to find the best known samples for foreground and background color of unknown pixels. Such methods do not perform well if there is an overlap in the color distribution of foreground and background regions because color cannot distinguish between these regions and hence, the selected samples cannot reliably estimate the matte. Similarly, alpha propagation based matting methods may fail when the affinity among neighboring pixels is reduced by strong edges. In this paper, we overcome these two problems by considering texture as a feature that can complement color to improve matting. The contribution of texture and color is automatically estimated by analyzing the content of the image. An objective function containing color and texture components is optimized to choose the best foreground and background pair among a set of candidate pairs. Experiments are carried out on a benchmark data set and an independent evaluation of the results show that the proposed method is ranked first among all other image matting methods.