Abstract

Given an area of interest in a video sequence, one may want to manipulate or edit the area, e.g. remove occlusions from or replace with an advertisement on it. Such a task involves three main challenges including temporal consistency, spatial pose, and visual realism. The proposed method effectively seeks an optimal solution to simultaneously deal with temporal alignment, pose rectifification, as well as precise recovery of the occlusion. To make our method applicable to long video sequences, we propose a batch alignment method for automatically aligning and rectifying a small number of initial frames, and then show how to align the remaining frames incrementally to the aligned base images. From the error residual of the robust alignment process, we automatically construct a trimap of the region for each frame, which is used as the input to alpha matting methods to extract the occluding foreground. Experimental results on both simulated and real data demonstrate the accurate and robust performance of our method.