Image Matting: A Comprehensive Survey on Techniques, Comparative Analysis, Applications and Future Scope

In the era of rapid growth of technologies, image matting plays a key role in image and video editing along with image composition. In many significant real-world applications such as film production, it has been widely used for visual effects, virtual zoom, image translation, image editing and video editing. With recent advancements in digital cameras, both professionals and consumers have become increasingly involved in matting techniques to facilitate image editing activities. Image matting plays an important role to estimate alpha matte in the unknown region to distinguish foreground from the background region of an image using an input image and the corresponding trimap of an image which represents a foreground and unknown region. Numerous image matting techniques have been proposed recently to extract high-quality matte from image and video sequences. This paper illustrates a systematic overview of the current image and video matting techniques mostly emphasis on the current and advanced algorithms proposed recently. In general, image matting techniques have been categorized according to their underlying approaches, namely, sampling-based, propagation-based, combination of sampling and propagation-based and deep learning-based algorithms. The traditional image matting algorithms depend primarily on color information to predict alpha matte such as sampling-based, propagation-based or combination of sampling and propagation-based algorithms. However, these techniques mostly use low-level features and suffer from high-level background which tends to produce unwanted artifacts when color is same or semi-transparent in the foreground object. Image matting techniques based on deep learning have recently introduced to address the shortcomings of traditional algorithms. Rather than simply depending on the color information, it uses deep learning mechanism to estimate the alpha matte using an input image and the trimap of an image. A comprehensive survey on recent image matting algorithms and in-depth comparative analysis of these algorithms has been thoroughly discussed in this paper.