SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR HIGH-QUALITY REAL-TIME FOREGROUND/BACKGROUND SEPARATION IN TELE-CONFERENCING USING SELF-REGISTERED COLOR/INFRARED INPUT IMAGES AND CLOSED-FORM NATURAL IMAGE MATTING TECHNIQUES

摘要

An apparatus and method is provided for near real-time, bi-layer segmentation of foreground and background portions of an image using the color and infrared images of the image. The method includes illuminating an object with infrared and visible light to produce infrared and color images of the object. An infrared mask is produced from the infrared image to predict the foreground and background portions of the image. A trimap is produced from the color image to define the color image into three distinct regions. A closed-form natural image matting algorithm is applied to the images to determine the foreground and background portions of the image.