Low-latency video matting

Abstract

Techniques are disclosed herein for implementing a novel, low latency, guidance map-free video matting system, e.g., for use in extended reality (XR) platforms. The techniques may be designed to work with low resolution auxiliary inputs (e.g., binary segmentation masks) and to generate alpha mattes (e.g., alpha mattes configured to segment out any object(s) of interest, such as human hands, from a captured image) in near real-time and in a computationally efficient manner. Further, in a domain-specific setting, the system can function on a captured image stream alone, i.e., it would not require any auxiliary inputs, thereby reducing computational costs—without compromising on visual quality and user comfort. Once an alpha matte has been generated, various alpha-aware graphical processing operations may be performed on the captured images according to the generated alpha mattes (e.g., background replacement operations, synthetic shallow depth of field (SDOF) rendering operations, and/or various XR environment rendering operations).