Natural image matting based on image inpainting

Deep image matting is a hot problem with applications in computer vision and image processing. It has been widely used in image composition, film production and video editing etc. The current matting method based on image inpainting uses a deep neural network to inpaint the foreground target and background region to further improve the accuracy of alpha matte. However, when the trimap contains large unknown regions, the excessive inpainting of foreground and background produce a lot of redundant information, which leads to a degradation of alpha matte quality. Therefore, to address this issue, a natural image matting method based on image inpainting is designed. This method involves the refinement process for trimap, which improves the quality of the trimap, enlarges the foreground and background regions providing additional information for image matting. Extensive experimental results on the composition-1k dataset demonstrate that the presented method provide high-quality alpha mattes not only in the case that the trimap contains small unknown regions, but also in the case that the trimap contains large unknown regions.