Hey HN! We originally built this as part of a bigger app but since removing backgrounds of images can be a tiresome task in itself we thought why not release it as a standalone tool? Feedback appreciated!
Fantastic! great job. On the photo I tried I was holding a water bottle, it between the water bottle and my body it left a small area (inside my elbow) - also between my knees. Given how fantastic it is, if there were a way for you to add a click to remove more parts that it hadn't thought of as the background (in this case between my elbow and body) it might be good. The wall itself in that space was very regular, but I can see why it didn't remove it, it might as well have been a jacket or something, in which case no need to remove it.
The outline of my body that it did make was amazing.
Great job! As a note, I think you will likely collect lots of deep links to "missing" pictures over time as your service becomes popular - you already got two such links on this page in a few hours...
You might want to make it more obvious that pictures aren't linkable by doing something like returning the image from a POST (might make for bad UI) or returning the image as a data url.
One idea for the "enter a URL" path. If you save the image URL for a longer time period, you could give the viewer the option to re-run that URL and perhaps save it to that location for another hour.
Or show a message like what Flask's logo does when you right-click it the first time [0]. e.g. "Note: Direct linking will not work. This image will disappear from our servers in an hour." (Possibly with "Click here to post to Twitter instead," which can help "persist" an image while spreading the site a bit further in the process.)
I cheated a little bit by creating an AI that allowed me to do it faster in a semi-automatic fashion. However, the first batch to train this "labeling"-network was generated manually, which took forever.
It would be so awesome if I could something like this at a much smaller scale in a darktable module for cleaning up images and for doing artistic types of portrait editing. Nice work!
> We process them, and temporarily store the results so you can download them. After that (about an hour later) we delete your files. We do not share your images or use them for any other purpose than removing the background and letting you download the result.
Glad they respect your rights on the image and delete their temp files after a reasonable amount of time.
Computation time increases quadratically with image size, so we had to set some limit. For now that's 500x500 px but we are looking into ways to increase the limit!
Video: Possible, we tried this prototypically already, but it would need some more optimization for good results (e.g. to avoid flickering between frames).
For higher resolution you should seriously consider charging a subscription, or on a pay-for-credits basis. Many organizations, especially those with limited or highly-demanded in-house design talent (ranging from finance to marketing to funded startups), would absolutely justify this product at rates absurdly greater than server costs. Unlike Fivver talent manually tracing boundaries, this has near instant turnaround, and that is HUGE for people with deadlines and infinite Uber budgets who just need stock images combined together.
Just want to jump in on this - I spent a significant amount of time in the print ad design world and something like this would be an easily justified expense.
I do video effects work and I'd suggest this could be very useful even with jitter, if you allow expanding the selection. A lot of time is spent creating "garbage mattes" for green screen footage, basically just roughly rotoscoping out the background so you can do key removal on just the important bits. So you could even massively downsample the video for your processing and still have a good enough matte.
Although, with your tech, and the more limited problem space of green screens and poorly lit green screens, you could probably make a pretty amazing tool to do the entire green screen removal.
I think they are using image segmentation with Deep Learning. The technique should be similar to this. Of course, there will be some traditional CV techniques as well.
I think many mobile device/camera apps have been doing this. The portrait feature where the background bokeh is artificially made is using a similar technique.
Thanks for doing this! This is an awesome app! I have a lot of pain trying to remove the background.
How long did it take to build this particular app?
I uploaded a photo of myself as a kid with my sister and grandpa. Early 80's, a washed out photo, where the lines were less definitive. Had some issues with that image.
I used to work in VFX, where I did my fair share of pain and roto.(before moving to tech) Cutting out hair was my single biggest dread. However this appears to do a stella job automatically.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadOriginal: https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/xrichar...
Background removed: https://www.remove.bg/system/uploads/image/processed/1c5f1c6...
HN needs to again raise the minimum karma required to downvote.
The outline of my body that it did make was amazing.
One idea for the "enter a URL" path. If you save the image URL for a longer time period, you could give the viewer the option to re-run that URL and perhaps save it to that location for another hour.
Or show a message like what Flask's logo does when you right-click it the first time [0]. e.g. "Note: Direct linking will not work. This image will disappear from our servers in an hour." (Possibly with "Click here to post to Twitter instead," which can help "persist" an image while spreading the site a bit further in the process.)
[0]: http://flask.pocoo.org/
Hard to judge because resulted image is tiny - but looked good.
Glad they respect your rights on the image and delete their temp files after a reasonable amount of time.
Also, any thought to handling video in the future?
Computation time increases quadratically with image size, so we had to set some limit. For now that's 500x500 px but we are looking into ways to increase the limit!
Video: Possible, we tried this prototypically already, but it would need some more optimization for good results (e.g. to avoid flickering between frames).
Source: am in NYC.
Although, with your tech, and the more limited problem space of green screens and poorly lit green screens, you could probably make a pretty amazing tool to do the entire green screen removal.
It did work (mostly) on this shot though: https://snouts.online/@Kye/101262023246984238
Poor Duke lost his ear...
Your about page says "sophisticated AI technology to detect foreground layers and separate them from the background" but that's pretty vague.
What kind of AI?
Maybe not true here, but far common than people care to admit.
https://github.com/anish9/Fashion-AI-segmentation
Impressive idea and execution! How could I never thought about this? :)
https://github.com/facebookresearch/deepmask/blob/master/REA...
You can read more about that approach here:
https://hackernoon.com/releasing-supervisely-person-dataset-...
Good results though for sure and very handy for quick image edits.
Of course I'm biased, but I think putting in the effort to have this work with pets would be well worth the time.
There's services that allow you to turn photos with transparent backgrounds into stickers.
Hook this up with that, and you may have a source of revenue.
I uploaded a photo of myself as a kid with my sister and grandpa. Early 80's, a washed out photo, where the lines were less definitive. Had some issues with that image.
This photo if you're curious. https://imgur.com/a/a4jQ5y1
https://www.remove.bg/system/uploads/image/processed/c9ae8e5...
Great job :-)
EDIT: And horses? I guess they are common in photos of trips.
I used to work in VFX, where I did my fair share of pain and roto.(before moving to tech) Cutting out hair was my single biggest dread. However this appears to do a stella job automatically.