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Abstract

In traditional media, such as photography and painting, a cardboard sheet with a cutout (called \emphpassepartout}) is frequently placed on top of an image. One of its functions is to increase the depth impression via the ``looking-through-a-window'' metaphor. This paper shows how an improved 3D~effect can be achieved by using a \emph{virtual passepartout: a 2D framing that selectively masks the 3D shape and leads to additional occlusion events between the virtual world and the frame. We introduce a pipeline to design virtual passepartouts interactively as a simple post-process on RGB images augmented with depth information. Additionally, an automated approach finds the optimal virtual passepartout for a given scene. Virtual passepartouts can be used to enhance depth depiction in images and videos with depth information, renderings, stereo images and the fabrication of physical passepartouts.