Variable refractive index in environment matte

Environment matting and compositing is a technique to extract a foreground object, including color, opacity, reflective and refractive properties, from a real-world scene, and synthesize new images by placing it into new environments. The description of the captured object is named environment matte. Recent matting and compositing techniques can produce quite realistic images for objects with complex optical properties. This paper presents an approximate method to transform the matte by simulating variation of the foreground object's refractive index. Our algorithms can deal with achromatous-and-transparent objects and the experimental results are visually acceptable. Our idea and method can be applied to produce some special video effects, which could be very useful in film making, compared with the extreme difficulty of physically changing an object's refractive index.