Matting and Compositing of Transparent and Refractive Objects

This paper introduces a new approach for matting and compositing transparent and refractive objects in photographs. The key to our work is an image-based matting model, termed the attenuation-refraction matte (ARM), that encodes plausible refractive properties of a transparent object along with its observed specularities and transmissive properties. We show that an object’s ARM can be extracted directly from a photograph using simple user markup. Once extracted, the ARM is used to paste the object onto a new background with a variety of effects, including compound compositing, Fresnel effect, scene depth, and even caustic shadows. User-studies find our results favorable to those obtained with Photoshop as well as perceptually valid in most cases. Our approach allows photo-editing of transparent and refractive objects in a manner that produces realistic effects previously only possible via 3D models or environment matting.