Self-supervised Automatic Matting

Xiaonan Hu, Zhiyuan Lu, Jingdong Zhao, Hao Lu

High-quality alpha mattes are notoriously expensive to annotate, creating a fundamental data bottleneck for deep image matting. While prior work attempts to reduce annotation cost using coarser labels like trimaps or masks, they remain reliant on costly per-pixel supervision, limiting scalability and generalization. In this work, we push the boundary further and ask: can we train an automatic matting model using only RGB images, with no manual annotation at all? We answer this by presenting SSMatte, a self-supervised framework that for the first time achieves performance on par with fully-supervised automatic matting. Our key insight is to decompose the problem into semantic anchoring and detail matting. SSMatte first generates a semantic matting prompt from frozen self-supervised ViT features by propagating class-token seeds via a novel, training-efficient semantic anchoring loss based on a generalized Rayleigh quotient. This prompt then anchors a detail matting network, which is optimized via a fixed-point-based loss that enforces alpha-RGB consistency. Extensive experiments show SSMatte outperforms prior weakly-supervised methods, matches the performance of fully-supervised models on portrait benchmarks, and demonstrates favorable scaling and generalization behaviors with additional data. Our work pushes automatic matting to an fresh, fully annotation-free paradigm. Code will be available.