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The work presents an interactive system for quickly creating alpha mattes for objects in a video. Unlike previous techniques commonly employed in the visual-fx industry (e.g., rotoscoping) our system can help novice users create professional quality mattes with very little manual effort.

These alpha mattes can then be used to cut out objects from one video and composite them into another video. Alpha mattes can also be used to apply image filters selectively to objects in a video.

Project website:
juew.org/projects/VideoCutout/VideoCutout.htm

Credits

84 Likes

  • Stephen Buchanan 1 year ago
    This is amazing! What a timesaver. In some of your finished products, the "cutout" looks a little too soft - is that perhaps more a case of being a little too heavy-handed on feathering the mask, near the end of the process? Not an effect of the technique itself, I hope?
  • pro 1 year ago
    The matte computation has 2 stages. First is the binary matte computation, which is done in real time. In this stage each pixel is marked as either fully foreground or background.

    In the second stage, which is done as an automatic post processing step, a soft/alpha matte for the pixels at the boundary of foreground and background pixels is computed. I agree that our second process is probably too heavy-handed in its feathering effect. Though these days there are better methods for computing alpha mattes for boundary pixels. For example - Anat Levin et al's "Closed Form Solution to Natural Image Matting."
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  • Brian Z plus 1 year ago
    i am calling the APL
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  • Jeremy Powlus plus 1 year ago
    siiiiiiiiiiiiick
    keep up the good work
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  • James 1 year ago
    ancy chance of the code being released under the GPL?
  • pro 1 year ago
    Thats not very likely. The code is owned by Microsoft.
  • James 1 year ago
    Aawa, what a shame. A project like this would be great in an open state. It could grow so fast... if only microsoft understood the concept of open source.
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  • Zalee 1 year ago
    hope this one will come out for the Mac system. Great research!
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  • E M 1 year ago
    Favorite part was the space-time cube.

    A quick question however, since this video being processed looks rather low resolution and low quality, would a higher resolution, HD video be able to capture finer mattes and finer grained effects?
  • pro 1 year ago
    The skate boarder sequence shown in the video was 720x480 resolution and if I remember correctly a 150 frames long.

    You would get higher quality mattes for higher resolution video. And you can always improve the quality of the matte by drawing more strokes.
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  • Marty Wichtmann 1 year ago
    very cool
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  • Mark Tomlinson 1 year ago
    Amazing use of trees.
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  • Paton MacDonald 1 year ago
    Where can I get this software?
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  • PT Vicami 1 year ago
    no more blue/green screens on the set! :)
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  • TweakingKnobs 1 year ago
    Awesome, but when is it going to be out ?
    and how much ?
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  • Keyfren 1 year ago
    Impresionante! Good work!
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  • Rick Kelvington 11 months ago
    I spoke to Mr. Cohen yesterday, and he told me this is not really going to be a REAL program, it was project that was not really turned into a final form. It's very sad, because, it's such an impressive concept. You can see something similar happening in real time in the Xbox 360 game "Your In The Movies". The good news is Soft Scissors can be purchased from Digital Film Tools, and it's called Power Mask, so if your good with macros, you can probably run it on your videos.
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  • TweakingKnobs 6 months ago
    man , this is very sad , such a great concept , program , own by microsoft.

    is there any papers on it or some info to code something like this?
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  • William R. Cousert 4 months ago
    I'd like to see Adobe include something like this in the next version of After Effects (CS5).
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  • TweakingKnobs 19 days ago
    any news on this proyect ?
    and are there any papers or info on how to codee this ?
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  • the paper is on their website
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