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best tool for separating (cropping) figure from background?

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urlwolf:
The scenario:
typical photo of a person against the background.
I'm interested in separating (cropping) figure from background, in an automatic (or semi-automatic) way. If possible, I'd like a program that could do this in batch mode.

Is there such a thing? I tried Xara extreme, but it seems you have to draw the boundaries yourself...
Thanks a lot

nudone:
can't say i've heard of anything that will do it in batch mode, or even in a completely automatic way.

really depends on how great the contrast is between the background and the object to separate and how 'clean' you want the separation.

requires manual input i'd say.

Perry Mowbray:
I don't think you're going to be able to find something that doesn't need some sort of input.

You can have a look at http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/photomontage/, it's input is quite revolutionary (though I had crash issues on my machine).

- Perry

elpresi:
There is an interesting free PS plugin:
http://graphics.cs.msu.su/en/research/Segment/index.html
http://research.graphicon.ru/growcut/gml-growcut.html

Ampa:
It is really going to depend upon the background... The film industry use green screen (or historically bluescreen) to matte actors out of one environment and into another.

If your background is complex and non uniform then you will need to do the process by hand.

If your background is simple and uniform in colour then you will be able to automate to a greater or lesser degree.

There are many tools that will help you, but the reason that there are so many is because this is a nontrivial task, and different scenarios require different solutions.

Here are a few starters...

Most of matting will be done in an application like Photoshop as these are raster / pixel based techniques that rely on differences in hue / brightness to detect edges.  Occasionally there is no choice but to cutout mattes by hand, in which case a vector solution can be used (perhaps with a tool such as Xara Xtreme).

Photoshop has many tools that help automate the matte proceedure - the Magic Wand Tool is particularly quick, and works well in simple cases.

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