Show HN: Fully-automatic image background removal tool

You, sir, are going to put Photoshop wallahs out of work !

Glad they respect your rights on the image and delete their temp files after a reasonable amount of time.

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 am not even kidding. This is probably the first time I have seen a truly useful application of AI that automates a normally labor-intensive and menial task. Kudos!

Even back then, I was fearful of making a career out of that job. At worst, my company could have offshored a lot of that work rather than paying full time benefits in NYC. And while there were a few plugins back then, they weren't this good.

I'm fortunate I was able to move my career in another direction, but I did work with some amazing people who knew PS/photography inside and out. A part of me is sad that these skills are increasingly obsolete.

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?

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.

However, as someone who's been doing this kind of work professionally for decades, I find the demo results rather poor.

I have mixed feelings about what I think is a trend, such as fake software bokeh, for instance. Even though it makes pro techniques available to the masses, quality takes such a plunge that I fear we may not recover, setting the “good enough” bar way too low.

Curious to see how this tool will evolve. Already impressive, with many potential use cases: products, animals, photomontages.

Besides resolution, how the app will handle super thin elements like hair will be key. A lot of tedious work is still required to cut out figures properly with Photoshop even though their selection tools got better over the years.

Great job :-)

Also, any thought to handling video in the future?

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...

1. Make a plug in for photoshop/gimp/[favorite editor]. You could charge for that service.

2. Figure out a way for users to manually fix any errors and use that data for further training.

Also, it is possible to see the background through the lens of my glasses; that portion of the background was not removed.

So how do you pay for it, and what does it cost me (in non-monetary form)?

The project utilizes CRF as RNN model to assign labels to pixels. The demo preserves pixels assigned to people while blacking out pixels associated with other labels. (Think of it as automating background removal around people)

> I would pay a small usage fee for ultra-high-res that covers the additional server costs needed to offer this.

Hard to judge because resulted image is tiny - but looked good.

but... how do I select a photo!?

cant drag-n-drop images on the webpage... so the slogan is a lie

impressive service nonetheless

> How does it work?

> We use sophisticated AI technology to detect foreground layers and separate them from the background.

You use "sophisticated AI technology"?

Why can't you write, that you trained a CNN and do some image postprocessing? This kind of voodoo-language turns me as a potential technical customer completely off.