Blue Screen Matting using Curved Separating Surfaces

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new ‘blue screen matting’ digital solution, which employs ‘curved separating surfaces’ in RGB colorspace. The ‘separating surface’ model was examined by Jim Blinn and Alvy Ray Smith at the 1996 Siggraph conference, and is the recognized model that is employed in two of the most common matting products being used by the industry today, the Ultimatte keying technology and IMAGICA/Photron's Primatte. With this paper, we extend the concept from the earlier model, which was defined with coarse polygons, to curved surfaces that maintain a more natural pixel distribution of the foreground data against the background screen. In this paper, I introduce a constrained grid surface patch (referred to as ‘OGP’ in this paper), which achieves a fast, practical computing solution for natural matte generation and background suppression. OGP offers the advantage of working with uneven green or blue screen conditions without a decrease in performance. An additional solution called the ‘Extended Matting Problem’ is also presented that uses two additional curved separating surfaces for background spill removal. I will also demonstrate how the new method processes difficult matte frames.

Published

2000-10

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M00168

ISBN

978-1-61482-933-1