Colour-drifted background trapped between hair strands defeats every
single-signal defence: the chroma key reads it as foreground (bgc ~0.07),
the segmenter backs it, ViTMatte rates it opaque, and post-hoc removal is
a proven dead end (it shreds the hair volume the same pixels belong to).
A second, trimap-free matting model (BiRefNet_HR-matting) is the only
tested model that separates this residue from the subject, so its opinion
is fused in as a veto: min-fusion that may only LOWER alpha, restricted to
the background-hued bright suspect zone (proj >= 3, L >= 45, feathered)
and gated by primary-alpha confidence (0.70 -> 0.95 ramp) so soft wisps
and dark hair are exempt by construction.
- settings/config/CLI: cross_check block, --cross-check/--no-cross-check
- alpha_post.cross_check_alpha after clean_alpha; second opinion reuses
BiRefNetSegmenter; saved to debug as cross_check_alpha.png
- chroma.bg_hue_projection extracted and shared with the trimap
- docs: methodology.md (new), hair_gap_artifacts.md (investigation log)
Verified: cross-check ON reproduces the visually-reviewed B1gate
prototype byte-for-byte on TestImage3; --no-cross-check reproduces the
previous baseline byte-for-byte; pink-bg FixImage1 face untouched.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- chroma: drop BackgroundModel.hsv_center/hue_sigma (unused since the green gating
went away), their estimation, _hue_distance, and the now-unused hsv channel from
convert_color_spaces (one fewer cvtColor per image).
- despill: delete the dead green-channel-algebra path (the pipeline always passes a
colour) and fold the remaining Lab-direction despill into a single despill() with
no screen_color arg (127 -> 60 lines). Renamed despill_green -> despill.
- settings: remove the now-dead ChromaSettings.hue_sigma_min and
DespillSettings.green_excess_margin (plus the matching config lines).
- docs/comments: generalise stale "green" wording to "background colour" (module
docstring, alpha_post/trimap/foreground/settings) and rename the trimap variable
green_bg -> screen_bg.
Kept: the unmix foreground fallback, --matting-method chroma, and green/blue as
illustrative examples. Verified: package compiles, both configs parse, and an
auto-detect end-to-end run is unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
Strategic pivot: the dropout-fill rescue, the anime-seg fill backend, the
BiRefNet+anime-seg intersection, and the recolor pass all existed to repair
source images whose hair was already green-contaminated or broken at generation
time. Fixing the source instead (clean pastel-background generation) makes the
matte high-contrast, so that whole compensation layer is unnecessary. Remove it.
- Two pipelines via segmentation.enabled:
false -> chroma-only (Chroma + ViTMatte)
true -> single segmenter (default anime-seg, switchable birefnet) -> trimap
then ViTMatte refines, pymatting estimates foreground, despill cleans spill.
- Generalise the green-hardcoded colour logic to a screen_color prior (hex, e.g.
"#CFEFFF"; default null = green auto-detect, byte-identical). chroma keys off
Lab/RGB distance to the colour; despill removes chroma along its Lab direction.
Added --screen-color CLI flag.
- Removed dead code: fill_seg_dropouts + seg_fill*/intersection params,
SegmentationSettings.fill_backend/fill_model_name/sharpen, unsharp_mask,
recolor.py + RecolorSettings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
lhk229
Codex