Replace the hardcoded green-screen auto-detection with a general flat-colour
detector. When screen_color is null the background colour is now detected from the
image border (dominant colour of the border strip) and used directly as the chroma
model, with a failure gate that raises when the border is not one clean flat colour
(gradient / texture / subject filling the frame).
- chroma: add detect_background_color + _background_border_cluster; the null case of
estimate_background_model samples the detected cluster directly (no seed search);
compute_bg_confidence is now always perceptual (Lab/RGB distance). Removed the green
heuristic (initial_green_candidates), the green multiplicative gating, the now-unused
_smoothstep, and five green-only ChromaSettings fields.
- pipeline: reuse the detected colour for de-spill in the auto case.
- settings / default.yaml: add detect_* tuning fields; refresh screen_color docs.
- README: document auto-detection + the failure gate, trimap modes, birefnet config.
A supplied --screen-color hex still uses the seed-search refinement. Validated:
detects green / pastel / text samples correctly, raises on gradient / two-colour, CLI
exits 1 on failure, green and pastel mattes unchanged in quality.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
README rewritten for the current design: two pipelines (chroma-only vs single
segmenter, default anime-seg), the screen_color prior (--screen-color / config,
green default), correct debug-file list, and HF/hf-mirror notes for the seg models.
No rescue/recolour layer is documented (it was removed).
green_screen_matting_workflow.md keeps the phase-1 green-screen spec but gains a
status note pointing to the README for the evolved architecture, and its debug-file
list is corrected (foreground_rgb / color_mask / seg_mask, not the old
foreground_background / foreground_correction / despill_mask).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
After the full-foreground despill (5ddf0cd) the residual green was confined to
semi-transparent hair (alpha < 0.5): 85% of the worst pixels had alpha < 0.3,
where a pixel-wise unmix (divide by small alpha) is too noisy to trust.
Replace the hand-rolled unmix/local-blur estimator with pymatting's
estimate_foreground_ml (Germer et al. multi-level closed form), which propagates
reliable foreground colour from high-alpha neighbours into the fringe and
estimates the background, so green spill is unmixed rather than clamped. The
despill pass stays as a light cleanup on top.
- foreground.method selects "ml" (default) or "unmix" (legacy heuristic kept as
a fallback when pymatting is unavailable, matching the chroma fallback idiom).
- ForegroundEstimate now exposes rgb (F), background (B) and a correction map;
debug outputs become foreground_rgb / foreground_background / foreground_correction.
Controlled comparison (same ViTMatte alpha, only foreground method changed),
edge_green_excess:
TestImage p95 0.176->0.031, mean 0.061->0.005
TestImage2 p95 0.165->0.004, mean 0.052->0.002
Adds pymatting (pulls in numba) to requirements.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>