Show HN: Open-source background removal in Node.js

npmjs.com

94 points·buss_jan··9 comments

IMG.LY's popular background removal js library is now available for NodeJS.

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This was discussed on HN several months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36505859

yeah but the readme says that the code is now available online

That's not enough of a difference for a new Show HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

Took me a while to find the relevant excerpt so here it is:

> New features and upgrades ("Foo 1.3.1 is out") generally aren't substantive enough to be Show HNs. A major overhaul is probably ok.

In this case, it feels more like a repost than anything else.

I thought at first the library would just call out to some web API to do the actual magic, but seems it's actually running the model locally, which is very nice to see.

So it seems there is a bundled models (bundle/models/{small,medium,large}) but I don't see the code responsible for creating those. Anyone knows where the source is located? It's the final piece of the puzzle to figure out if this thing is FOSS or not.

Last time I looked into this their training code is kept internal and they're just releasing the model weights.

Hmm, I see. That makes the "Open-Source" in the title a bit hard to understand. It is just the library that sits between the developer and the usage of the model that is open source, rather than that the "background removal" part.

How good is the model? I would have expected some kind of hint from the user to help it know what the background is. Something like a selection of where the subject is or what the subject is, at least as an optional fallback.

What is the underlying model used?

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