If you've ever wanted to add that missing member of your family to a group photograph, you can now, given newly developed technology. Simply find a picture of the missing person, determine a ""matte"" that will lift them out and leave the background behind, and use the matte to insert them in the original image. Matting refers to the problem of accurate foreground estimation in images and video.

Image and Video Matting provides a comprehensive review of existing image and video matting algorithms and systems, with an emphasis on the advanced techniques that have been recently proposed. Various methods are described and contrasted and finally tested against a uniform set of examples. It is most appropriate for a graduate level course in computational photography, or for any student or serious practitioner interested in the inner workings of matting methods.