Papers › Background Matting: The World is Your Green Screen
Background Matting: The World is Your Green Screen
Soumyadip Sengupta, Vivek Jayaram, Brian Curless, Steve Seitz, Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman
We propose a method for creating a matte -- the per-pixel foreground color and alpha -- of a person by taking photos or videos in an everyday setting with a handheld camera. Most existing matting methods require a green screen background or a manually created trimap to produce a good matte. Automatic, trimap-free methods are appearing, but are not of comparable quality. In our trimap free approach, we ask the user to take an additional photo of the background without the subject at the time of capture. This step requires a small amount of foresight but is far less time-consuming than creating a trimap. We train a deep network with an adversarial loss to predict the matte. We first train a matting network with supervised loss on ground truth data with synthetic composites. To bridge the domain gap to real imagery with no labeling, we train another matting network guided by the first network and by a discriminator that judges the quality of composites. We demonstrate results on a wide variety of photos and videos and show significant improvement over the state of the art.
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Code
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Image Matting | Adobe Matting | Adobe LS-GAN | MSE | 0.97 | #1 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Matting | Adobe Matting | Adobe LS-GAN | SAD | 1.72 | #1 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Matting | Adobe Matting | IM | MSE | 1.16 | #2 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Matting | Adobe Matting | IM | SAD | 1.92 | #2 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Matting | Adobe Matting | BM | MSE | 1.33 | #3 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Matting | Adobe Matting | BM | SAD | 2.53 | #3 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Matting | Adobe Matting | CAM | MSE | 4.5 | #4 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Matting | Adobe Matting | CAM | SAD | 3.67 | #4 of 4 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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