  Image matting refers to extracting precise alpha matte from natural images,
and it plays a critical role in various downstream applications, such as image
editing. Despite being an ill-posed problem, traditional methods have been
trying to solve it for decades. The emergence of deep learning has
revolutionized the field of image matting and given birth to multiple new
techniques, including automatic, interactive, and referring image matting. This
paper presents a comprehensive review of recent advancements in image matting
in the era of deep learning. We focus on two fundamental sub-tasks: auxiliary
input-based image matting, which involves user-defined input to predict the
alpha matte, and automatic image matting, which generates results without any
manual intervention. We systematically review the existing methods for these
two tasks according to their task settings and network structures and provide a
summary of their advantages and disadvantages. Furthermore, we introduce the
commonly used image matting datasets and evaluate the performance of
representative matting methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. Finally,
we discuss relevant applications of image matting and highlight existing
challenges and potential opportunities for future research. We also maintain a
public repository to track the rapid development of deep image matting at
https://github.com/JizhiziLi/matting-survey.
