Thanks for the link! Real time is a pretty big constraint, and the input for those results is a much more complete labeling than we expect (only 22 to 44 pixels around the ground truth boundary are left uncertain). But I'll definitely read the paper and hopefully we can gain some insights from it!
Have a look at KNN Matting http://ihome.ust.hk/~dli/projects/knn/. Their MATLAB implementation uses a similar style to yours but is not as real time. They take single mouse clicks and spread them over a much larger window/bounding box. Only takes a few clicks on foreground/background to get excellent results.
Actually Shared Matting is far more applicable than KNN Matting. It's designed for real time use and has a post processing step which will help you deal with fine detail like hair.
You should read Jue Wang's 2007 survey paper which groups and puts all the techniques in context, then a handful of the top performing papers from recent years on alphamatting.com
A bit off topic, but I'm working on a video interviewing startup and one of the things we'd looove to offer is (semi-)automatic Chrome Keying / green screening to show just a person's torso and face.
Might (one of) you know what's the state of the art in research on this topic as well?
Thanks for the link! Real time is a pretty big constraint, and the input for those results is a much more complete labeling than we expect (only 22 to 44 pixels around the ground truth boundary are left uncertain). But I'll definitely read the paper and hopefully we can gain some insights from it!