Abstract In this paper, we propose a deep propagation based image matting framework by introducing deep learning into learning an alpha matte propagation principal. Our deep learning architecture is a concatenation of a deep feature extraction module, an affinity learning module and a matte propagation module. These three modules are all differentiable and can be optimized jointly via an end-to-end training process. Our framework results in a semantic-level pairwise similarity of pixels for propagation by learning deep image representations adapted to matte propagation. It combines the power of deep learning and matte propagation and can therefore surpass prior state-of-theart matting techniques in terms of both accuracy and training complexity, as validated by our experimental results from 243K images created based on two benchmark matting databases.