Meidya Koeshardianto presenting his dissertation on the open session of doctoral promotion at the Department of Electrical Engineering ITS

ITS Campus, ITS News – The Multimedia is currently being a rapidly-themed focus for Meidya Koeshardianto, the student of the doctoral program of the Department of Electrical Engineering Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember (ITS). In his dissertation study titled Video Composting Using the Spatio Temporal Poisson Blending Based Temporal Alpha Matte succeeded in being the 142th doctor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, last February.

Meidya explains that image matting is a technique often used in multimedia. Matting itself is one of the basic techniques in the field of computer vision that aims to separate the foreground and background elements. “The technique is still the best technique in the multimedia field,” said the 1979-born Promovendus.

According to the alumnus of the Department of Mathematics ITS, today to facilitate the matting, film production often uses the green or blue screen as background. However, it is still felt to have some weaknesses, which is the process that takes place and can be affected by exposure when taking pictures.

Based on that problem, Natural Image Matting techniques were chosen by Promovendus who once completed a master’s degree program in the Department of Electrical Engineering ITS as the solution he offered. The application of this carried technique can be a breakthrough in the cinematic world because it no longer needs to use a green or blue screen. “Production costs can also be decreased,” said the father of four children.

The research conducted by Meidya focuses on how to make the matting process automatically. There are also differences between automatic and manual results. The automatic matting method is recorded more quickly and the resulting memory also consumes less memory. “The automatic method shortens the work to be more effective and simple,” explains the lecturer of the Trunojoyo University Madura (UTM).

Meidya Koeshardianto (left) after the open session of doctoral promotion in Department Electrical Engineering ITS

The Automatic Matting will produce an alpha-matte of each frame. Alpha Matte is a value that is relatively proportional to the foreground and background values. If the value is close to one then the pixel is the foreground, and if it is close to zero then it is the background. “Alpha matte itself is influenced by some parameters i.e. epsilon value, local window, and the size of the Laplacian,” he explained.

The stage after the resultant alpha matte is compositing. The compositing itself is the opposite of matting, it combines the foreground with a new background. Meidya mentioned that before compositing, the process spatio temporal poisson blending needs to be conducted first. “Spatio Poisson Blending can create a softer video gradation after going through the video compositing process,” claimed this lecturer of Department of Informatics Engineering UTM.

Meidya explains that this can be applied in film production, one of the genres of action or fantasy that usually requires a hard-to-reach background. So taking scenes can be done anywhere and the background can be changed with anything even without a green or blue screen.

Although this research is still not perfect, Meidya explains that he will continue and improve its research until it can be maximally implemented in the multimedia field. He hopes that this research in the future can contribute to advancing the multimedia field of Indonesia even the world. “I hope this can advance the Indonesia multimedia field,” he said. (ai/rev/ITS Public Relations)