Enhanced Use of Mattes for Easy Image Composition

Existing matting methods focus on improving matte quality to produce high-quality composites. This generally requires significant manual interaction, a tedious task for the user. Despite these efforts, the composites may still exhibit evident artifacts, especially in the case of transparent and complicated objects as their related pixels always contain percentage of the background. In this paper, we focus on the enhanced use of mattes to produce satisfactory composites by suppressing the discrepancies around objects of interest. This approach is motivated by cloning methods but overcomes their shortcoming of ineffective treatment of the over-included regions around objects of interest. For this, we present an enhanced matting function by including a term to smooth the local contrasts for seamless composition, and meanwhile, we develop a novel algorithm to generate mattes with reduced user interaction and improved usability. As a result, we reduce the composite's dependence on the user's input and only require the user to drag a box to enclose the objects of interest. As shown in the user studies and the experimental results, our method requires many times less user interaction than the existing matting methods and cloning methods. Our method is more effective in producing good composites in a simple interactive manner, especially when treating transparent and complicated objects, thereby providing a superior approach for image composition.