Patent ID: 8792718

Claim:
A method, comprising: applying, by one or more computing devices, temporal filtering to an alpha matte sequence for an image sequence comprising a plurality of frames to remove or reduce temporal jitter in the alpha matte sequence, wherein said applying temporal filtering comprises: computing level sets for each of two or more sequential initial alpha mattes in the alpha matte sequence, wherein each level set includes two or more contour lines of the respective initial alpha matte, wherein each contour line corresponds to a level in the level set; computing an average contour line at each level from the contour lines of the level sets at the respective level according to a weighted distance-transform-based technique to generate an averaged level set for the sequence of two or more initial alpha mattes, the weighted distance-transform-based technique comprising a weighted interpolation of the level sets for each of two or more sequential initial alpha mattes; and generating a temporally smoothed alpha matte from the two or more sequential initial alpha mattes according to the averaged level set.