FuzzyMatte: Interactive Matting

People: Yuanjie Zheng, Rohith MV and Chandra Kambhamettu

Collaborators: Thomas Bauer and Karl Steiner

FuzzyMatte is a online interactive matting algorithm. An initial alpha map is computed and displayed from the first scribble or trimap provided by the user. The user can then add more strokes to improve the alpha map. The alpha map is then recomputed online through integration of the new inputs and the old alpha map. The recomputation is performed in an efficient manner in the sense that alpha values of a minimal set of pixels is updated. To achieve this, we use the notion of fuzzy connectedness of a pixel to known foreground and background. This effectively captures the adjacency and similarity between image elements. Upon applying this technique to a range of images, we found that FuzzyMatte generates high quality matte in an online interactive setting.

FuzzyMatte can be applied towards segmentation of Ground Glass Opacity tumors of the lung in CT data. As the extent and opacity of the tumors play an important role in determining the prognosis, matting can be utilized towards segmentation of tumor. The foreground region in this case represents the tumor and the background is the lung volume. The user can input strokes on the images and obtain a matte which represents the opacity of the tumor. Below are some of the results from the application of our algorithm on lung CT images.

Related publications and patents

  • Yuanjie Zheng, Chandra Kambhamettu, Jingyi Yu, Thomas Bauer, Karl Steiner, FuzzyMatte: A Computationally Efficient Scheme for Interactive Matting, CVPR 2008: IEEE Computer Society Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.
  • Yuanjie Zheng, Chandra Kambhamettu, Thomas Bauer, Karl Steiner, Estimation of Ground-Glass Opacity Measurement in CT Lung Images, MICCAI 2008: International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention, New York City, USA, September, 2008.
  • Patent filed: Systems and Methods for obtaining an Image Alpha Matte. Inventors: Yuanjie Zheng, Chandra Kambhamettu, Karl V. Steiner and Thomas Bauer (Pub. No.: US 2009/0315910 A1; Appl. No.: 12/487,161)