Image matting through a Web browser

Image matting is a process of foreground extraction from an image. An interactive, Web-based tool, called NIM 2.0, for image matting is presented in this paper. NIM is the first image matting tool accessible through a Web browser. Its algorithm has been improved from the first version to make it faster. How NIM is used, why it works, its architecture, and experimental results are described. It can extract a foreground with thin, thread-like shapes. It begins to process inputs immediately after the user has started to paint with a brush roughly along the boundary between the foreground and the background. While painting, the user can stop anywhere to change the width of brush as needed to achieve good matting quality. The quality of the foreground extracted by NIM is usually better or not worse than those done by the other two online tools and Photoshop. NIM is fast and the amount of time required to complete matting is essentially limited by the speed of brush movement only. Several variations of our algorithm are also discussed and experimented.