A Learning-Based Approach to Reduce JPEG Artifacts in Image Matting

Inchang Choi, Sunyeong Kim, Michael S. Brown, Yu-Wing Tai; Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2013, pp. 2880-2887

Single image matting techniques assume high-quality input images. The vast majority of images on the web and in personal photo collections are encoded using JPEG compression. JPEG images exhibit quantization artifacts that adversely affect the performance of matting algorithms. To address this situation, we propose a learning-based post-processing method to improve the alpha mattes extracted from JPEG images. Our approach learns a set of sparse dictionaries from training examples that are used to transfer details from high-quality alpha mattes to alpha mattes corrupted by JPEG compression. Three different dictionaries are defined to accommodate different object structure (long hair, short hair, and sharp boundaries). A back-projection criteria combined within an MRF framework is used to automatically select the best dictionary to apply on the object's local boundary. We demonstrate that our method can produces superior results over existing state-of-the-art matting algorithms on a variety of inputs and compression levels.