A novel technique for performing video matting, which is built upon a proposed image matting algorithm that is fully automatic is disclosed. The disclosed methods utilize a PCA-based shape model as a prior for guiding the matting process, so that manual interactions required by most existing image matting methods are unnecessary. By applying the image matting algorithm to these foreground windows, on a per frame basis, a fully automated video matting process is attainable. The process of aligning the shape model with the object is simultaneously optimized based on a quadratic cost function.