Cool tool but just as a suggestion, having that example of removing 'Copyright' watermarks is probably a bad idea in terms of legal CYA and just general decency in terms of respecting attribution.
If that is what people want to do with the tool is beyond your control but to showcase it in your example gets you on the hook for ill-intent.
Yup, that was my first thought too: people will probably have the idea of using the tool to remove watermarks on their own anyway, but by giving it as an example you are putting yourself in the line of fire.
Because it doesn’t need to be illegal to cause legal issues. All it takes is one wealthy enough, persistent enough, annoyed enough plaintiff, to make your year extremely shitty.
Some time ago, youtube-dl, a downloader tool for YT, faced legal troubles from RIAA simply for showing a copyrighted video URL in a demo. Something about anti-circumvention. [1]
Given that this project is an alternative to Adobe's features, the latter may feel tempted to claim this is a tool intended for copyright circumvention.
Particularly, inducement liability could be a real issue here.
In MGM v. Grokster, the Supreme Court unanimously said, "[O]ne who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties."
I've often wondered if I could get Apple computers sued by ripping CDs with iTunes and sharing the results (ripping is copy infringement in the UK, the media companies had the government remove format-shifting rights and we don't have Fair Use [our Fair Dealing is very conservative]).
No, because you can rip CDs containing stuff under some creative commons license or some other license that permits copying.
You probably can't sue a knife maker because you killed someone with one of their knives. My knives usually cut vegetables and tofu, which is allowed as far as I know.
It gets complicated, you can obviously use any 'hacking' tool for red team operations, but tools that are published and were designed for such hacking (cracking, intrusion) still appear to be subject to legal control (in Europe; I guess like how encryption tools that are subject to defence controls in USA can obviously be used for non-nefarious purposes but it's still illegal to export them [or was in the past---browsers used to hobble the encryption built it---I think still is?]).
Similar here, but worse than the knife/tool analogy: when you rip a copyright CD the system gathers all the data on the CD to present in the interface but doesn't warn you about the copyright; it is designed to rip commercial, copyrighted music.
Turns out the Font family is specified as "Copperplate, Papyrus, fantasy" and my system didn't have any font that matched. Fixed it by installing the Impact font, as it matches "fantasy".
Total tangent but Imgur simply does not load on Firefox for Android now? Linked page just spins forever "loading" the linked image until I request Desktop Site, at which point it happily loads.
An image hosting site that cannot (errrrr, "cannot") display images. Imagine.
I remember when the smart object removal feature was added to photoshop and it was pretty cool. The fact that you can now get the same functionality working even better in a free browser tool is mind blowing.
Really nice. I tried removing someone behind a wire grate, and it correctly identified them, replaced the wire grate and filled in the grate holes with decent background imitation.
I tried with a moderately complex image [0] and it failed to properly remove anything.
Edit: saw matsemann's comment - I was using Firefox, where selecting areas and clicking remove did nothing. Tried Chrome and got the same result of progress bar and then broken image. Same result in Safari. All on MacOS.
Hmm, in Firefox a progress bar shows for a few seconds after clicking "remove", and then nothing else happens. In Chrome the image disappears and is replaced by a broken image icon.
We will definitely keep it free. We are still trying out different business plans and will leave this answer open for now. Sorry for the vague response.
@Wistar I'm over the moon hearing this and would love to make this official asap. Could you please shoot us an email at support@cleanupphotos.com so we can get you at least onboard with a beta? I'm so overwhelmed to hear serious users willing to support us!
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I made one of these back in the day. Also allowing positive selections gives the model a lot more information and gives the user more power. You can use that to easily remove gridlines and smudge marks in photos of drawings without having to select every little thing you want deleted, or similarly you can positively select the main subject and a bit of scenery, negatively select a few passers-by, and let the model remove a crowd. The key point is that it moves some of the training-time bias toward a runtime selection, allowing better results on a wider variety of tasks (at the cost of more clicks on photos the model understands with few removals happening).
Meant as constructive feedback for OP: the UI is certainly more agreeable on the eyes, and I find the brush selection more convenient than OPs box selector.
@moffkalast, thanks for the feedback! It's currently at 1024 pixels, hope that's not as bad as the experience yesterday. The processing speed will slow down a bit though, hope that won't affect the usability on phones. Thank you!
We haven't yet tested all the screen sizes so we've built it to look nice on laptops and phones. Please let me know if the texts are showing up weird on your device. I'll make sure it doesn't. Thanks a bunch!
I'm rather ignorant in that domain, so I wonder if some people could enlighten me. What are the AI tasks behind this?
I can identify two steps:
- Identifying an approximate shape of background vs foreground to get something more precise than just a rectangle. What is it called? Just background detection?
- Actually filling-in the holes. I think this is called a diffusion task? Is that correct? ddg-ing around looks like diffusion is the name of the method rather than the actual task, but I can't find the name of the task.
I'm curious at whether some existing open models would be usable on smartphones to make an opensource app (or maybe there are already such apps I'm unaware of)
I've personally tried to remove watches, glasses, small things blocking the skin and they are fine. But for large portions, it won't be good. Someone pointed out things like a better algorithm might give more realistic results. Those are in our pipeline, but they require more hardware resources which might end up as a sign-up service. Similar thing goes to processing higher resolution images.
This produced really impressive results in removing a creased dent in a car door and a pile of rocks from in front of a fence. Both photos were at an oblique angle and I thought the result was good enough for commercial use. I used Chrome on an iPad.
This is a cool version of a suggestive AI product with a great, simple interface for reviewing. Well done -- we admire this type of product at Kapwing, the company I lead.
It's so good that I though you were making a joke and posting the classic edited photo, but after looking at the wave patterns, they look different. Also the bottom of the other side of the channel is better in your version.
I would not have said 'garbage service', but CloudFlare does make we want to punch a wall or sometimes. I get the impression that half the people using CloudFlare don't actually need it.
Really, how? I would have thought that running the image processing on that backend would be much more expensive than serving the relatively static website?
Who is DDoSing you? This website is not a high-profile target, I'm not sure why anyone would be interested in attacking this. Or do your logs say otherwise?
By 'traffic routing' do you mean CDN, or reverse-proxy or what? A single server with properly-configured client-side HTTP caching should do the trick for serving a static site.
120 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] threadIf that is what people want to do with the tool is beyond your control but to showcase it in your example gets you on the hook for ill-intent.
I can think of two related topics:
* Export restriction on encryption (does not apply here)
* YouTube's content policy on hacking tutorials (not applicable here either, since this is not YouTube)
Given that this project is an alternative to Adobe's features, the latter may feel tempted to claim this is a tool intended for copyright circumvention.
[1]: https://commonsware.com/blog/2020/10/24/youtube-dl-avoiding-...
Particularly, inducement liability could be a real issue here.
In MGM v. Grokster, the Supreme Court unanimously said, "[O]ne who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties."
You probably can't sue a knife maker because you killed someone with one of their knives. My knives usually cut vegetables and tofu, which is allowed as far as I know.
Similar here, but worse than the knife/tool analogy: when you rip a copyright CD the system gathers all the data on the CD to present in the interface but doesn't warn you about the copyright; it is designed to rip commercial, copyrighted music.
Turns out the Font family is specified as "Copperplate, Papyrus, fantasy" and my system didn't have any font that matched. Fixed it by installing the Impact font, as it matches "fantasy".
An image hosting site that cannot (errrrr, "cannot") display images. Imagine.
Edit: saw matsemann's comment - I was using Firefox, where selecting areas and clicking remove did nothing. Tried Chrome and got the same result of progress bar and then broken image. Same result in Safari. All on MacOS.
[0] https://i.imgur.com/mbEnZYD.jpg
Example URL:
Response contents:I made one of these back in the day. Also allowing positive selections gives the model a lot more information and gives the user more power. You can use that to easily remove gridlines and smudge marks in photos of drawings without having to select every little thing you want deleted, or similarly you can positively select the main subject and a bit of scenery, negatively select a few passers-by, and let the model remove a crowd. The key point is that it moves some of the training-time bias toward a runtime selection, allowing better results on a wider variety of tasks (at the cost of more clicks on photos the model understands with few removals happening).
Still: great work, OP!
Unfortunately both output images at thumbnail quality, so it's an academic exercise only and not anything actually useful.
I can identify two steps:
- Identifying an approximate shape of background vs foreground to get something more precise than just a rectangle. What is it called? Just background detection?
- Actually filling-in the holes. I think this is called a diffusion task? Is that correct? ddg-ing around looks like diffusion is the name of the method rather than the actual task, but I can't find the name of the task.
I'm curious at whether some existing open models would be usable on smartphones to make an opensource app (or maybe there are already such apps I'm unaware of)
In general, diffusion isn’t a good way to do it, as diffusion fills in the missing hole with data with fewer small details than the surrounding area.
Modern smartphones are fast enough for implementations.
This is valuable feedback, thank you!
Although perhaps the emotional implications of using "hug" are worth the unusual nature of the phrase.
https://imgur.com/a/ypyIhB3
Not too bad! Can definitely tell it's been edited, but for a quick removal it was painless.
For context: https://www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-photo-...
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Thanks for using this garbage service.
By 'traffic routing' do you mean CDN, or reverse-proxy or what? A single server with properly-configured client-side HTTP caching should do the trick for serving a static site.