environment matting

The work is based on the SIGGRAPH 1999 paper by Doug Zongker et al.

Overview

There exists a technique known as blue-screen matting which is commonly used to composite images with novel backgrounds. This is used in movies frequently. The basic idea is to take two pictures of an object in front of a known background; then we can recomposite the image of that object with an arbitrary novel background.

For example:

The Problem

Clearly blue screen matting leaves something to be desired for translucent objects such as the three wine glasses in the example above -- it fails to retain transmission information. Because of this, the composited image is unconvincing.

The Solution

Environment matting solves this problem by retaining the transmission information. This is done by taking pictures of the image in front of a number of structured backgrounds. Using these images, we can approximate the refraction and reflection off of the object.

When an environment matted image is composited with a novel background, the results are much more convincing:

More Results

Here are some more images that we generated using environment matting.

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