Papers › Revisiting Context Aggregation for Image Matting
Revisiting Context Aggregation for Image Matting
Qinglin Liu, Xiaoqian Lv, Quanling Meng, Zonglin Li, Xiangyuan Lan, Shuo Yang, Shengping Zhang, Liqiang Nie
Traditional studies emphasize the significance of context information in improving matting performance. Consequently, deep learning-based matting methods delve into designing pooling or affinity-based context aggregation modules to achieve superior results. However, these modules cannot well handle the context scale shift caused by the difference in image size during training and inference, resulting in matting performance degradation. In this paper, we revisit the context aggregation mechanisms of matting networks and find that a basic encoder-decoder network without any context aggregation modules can actually learn more universal context aggregation, thereby achieving higher matting performance compared to existing methods. Building on this insight, we present AEMatter, a matting network that is straightforward yet very effective. AEMatter adopts a Hybrid-Transformer backbone with appearance-enhanced axis-wise learning (AEAL) blocks to build a basic network with strong context aggregation learning capability. Furthermore, AEMatter leverages a large image training strategy to assist the network in learning context aggregation from data. Extensive experiments on five popular matting datasets demonstrate that the proposed AEMatter outperforms state-of-the-art matting methods by a large margin.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Image Matting | Composition-1K | AEMatter | Conn | 12.46 | #2 of 13 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Matting | Composition-1K | AEMatter | Grad | 4.76 | #2 of 13 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Matting | Composition-1K | AEMatter | MSE | 2.26 | #2 of 13 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Matting | Composition-1K | AEMatter | SAD | 17.53 | #2 of 13 | 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.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections