End-to-end Video Matting with Trimap Propagation

The research of video matting mainly focuses on temporal coherence and has gained significant improvement via neural networks. However, matting usually relies on user-annotated trimaps to estimate alpha values, which is a labor-intensive issue. Although recent studies exploit video object segmentation methods to propagate the given trimaps, they suffer inconsistent results. Here we present a more robust and faster end-to-end video matting model equipped with trimap propagation called FTP-VM (Fast Trimap Propagation - Video Matting). The FTP-VM combines trimap propagation and video matting in one model, where the additional backbone in memory matching is replaced with the proposed lightweight trimap fusion module. The segmentation consistency loss is adopted from automotive segmentation to fit trimap segmentation with the collaboration of RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) to improve the temporal coherence. The experimental results demonstrate that the FTP-VM performs competitively both in composited and real videos only with few given trimaps. The efficiency is eight times higher than the state-of-the-art methods, which confirms its robustness and applicability in real-time scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/csvt32745/FTP-VM.