
Show HN: Unscreen – Automatically remove video backgrounds with ML - groe
https://www.unscreen.com/sample_videos
======
nixy
This has been submitted multiple times as a “Show HN” but as it is a paid
service, I guess this is a marketing strategy.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=unscreen.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=unscreen.com)

~~~
abalaji
Doesn't this violate the spirit of Show HN? I thought only the authors could
submit them unless they are all authors of the project.

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sytelus
If you want to get traction, you need to be far more creative in your business
model. The main application of background removal is online meetings and its
already well implemented but it leaves a lot to be desired. One thing you can
do is to make service completely free. Offer a desktop app that creates a
virtual camera that you can use in Zoom, Teams etc. Differentiate yourself by
adding features such as much more cool and fun background wall papers or even
live videos. Focus on adoption, not revenue. Once you get traction, offer
premium background images or videos. Create a marketplace where people can
buy/sell. Focus on buyout by big players because ultimately they have the
platforms with millions of users where you can provide far more value.

Removal of background in images is also big (your site only seem to offer
video/gifs). I've personally tried half dozen solutions and all fell short in
low lighting scenario. If you are actually doing good here, you can beat
competition. There are probably hundred websites out there for background
removal for images, none works well.

~~~
bioipbiop
There is a reason background removal sucks on chat apps. I fiddle around with
the state of the art approaches, it takes a very expensive machine to get to
an acceptable frame rate. It wouldn’t scale.

~~~
maktouch
I'm pretty happy with XSplit VCam
([https://www.xsplit.com/vcam](https://www.xsplit.com/vcam))

~~~
atombender
Anything like this for macOS?

------
mobilio
From same authors that make tool for removing backgrounds from images -
remove.bg

It was discussed here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697601](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697601)

~~~
Jaruzel
BEWARE. remove.bg seems to have a malware/fake Chrome update popup.

~~~
TonyTrapp
Fresh Chromium installation, no adblocking or other content blocking plugins.
Zero advertisements and popups on that site. I keep reading these kind of
comments on HN and everytime it seems to be only that one person reporting the
problem that sees that behavior. Are you sure your network is not compromised?

~~~
Jaruzel
> Are you sure your network is not compromised?

It's definitely not. Also used 3 different browsers - each one showed the same
dialog but with the name and version of that browser. It doesn't happen on my
mobile over WiFi (rules out network injection).

This is what I'm seeing:
[https://imgur.com/a/o9PNmaU](https://imgur.com/a/o9PNmaU)

It's being inserted via a .js file on static.remove.bg:

[https://static.remove.bg/remove-bg-
web/38c6be57b031c26a2186b...](https://static.remove.bg/remove-bg-
web/38c6be57b031c26a2186be68133e5eeaec32f4b7/packs/js/application-b38f0b2216d2fa06c6dc.js)

(search for 'out of date' )

So either the site owner is complicit, or they've been hacked.

Edit: Fired up a VM of Windows 7 - Same message - so unless my routers been
hacked to inject that script somehow, i'm 99% certain it's not me.

~~~
aembleton
Looking at the code, it is using a script from Browser Update[1] to determine
whether to show that message.

Here's the line from the js you linked to that checks the browser version:

    
    
        window.checkBrowserVersion = function() { i()({ required: { i: 12, e: -4, f: -3, o: -3, s: -1, c: -3 }, insecure: !0, unsupported: !0, reminder: 0, reminderClosed: 168, style: "corner", api: 2019.06, test: !1, onshow: function() { window.track && window.track("BrowserUpdate", "outdated_version_dialog", "Browser version outdated dialog") } }) }, $((function() { window.checkBrowserVersion() }));
    

The c: -3 is the crucial bit that should cause it to trigger if your version
is at least 3 versions out of date.

Yours isn't though. Can you access [http://browser-update.org](http://browser-
update.org) ? If not, then there might be something with your DNS settings.
Have you tried tethering through your phone? Have you changed your user agent?

1\. [http://browser-update.org/#install](http://browser-update.org/#install)

~~~
aembleton
Just checked, and my Chrome is on version 84. Version 80 is out of date.

You need to update Chrome.

~~~
Jaruzel
To be frank, I don't _need_ to do anything. I'll update Chrome when I'm ready,
thanks.

What I object to, is a dodgy popup appearing on an unrelated website.

~~~
noja
You don't _need_ to call an ambulance when you break your leg, but your
browser has at least five high vulnerabilities (and one critical
vulnerability).

------
cateye
It's actually quite funny that the Zoom auto remove background does a pretty
good job. I can't get the same results easily in Adobe Premiere actually.

Snapchat filters are even more impressive and it is magnitudes more difficult
and time consuming to get similar results in After Effects.

I really wondered if I was missing something so watched a lot of YouTube
tutorials on background removal and object tracking and all I see is that it
is very laborious and even than not always a good enough results with
edge/transparency artifacts etc.

Adobe really needs to implement new features for this because the expectations
are changed by these apps and the bar is much higher.

~~~
bonoboTP
In my experience zoom does a horrible job. It's a flickering mess, half the
head is missing, etc. Perhaps in great lighting conditions it's better.

------
tsherr
Looks very impressive, but it seems cripplingly expensive.

I don't play with this much, but when I use my green screen, I'm often doing
15 minute videos, so it is well out of my hobby budget.

~~~
rplnt
The application of this would probably be different from what your use case is
(since you can use green screen).

~~~
hadeson
Most kinds of professional applications I could think of would better off with
a green screen. On the other hand, using this for editing videos in the wild
with messy background still not good enough.

------
godmode2019
Looks cool, this model is start of the art I believe
[https://app.wandb.ai/stacey/greenscreen/reports/Two-Shots-
to...](https://app.wandb.ai/stacey/greenscreen/reports/Two-Shots-to-Green-
Screen-Collage-with-Deep-Learning--VmlldzoxMDc4MjY)

~~~
motoboi
I believe this is homegrow from their photo background-removal tool remove.bg

Probably frame by frame, not real-time. But not less impressive.

------
victornomad
Looks very impressive, but please do not autoplay all the videos at once on
the website. My computer fans started to spin like crazy!

~~~
mmwelt
It killed my Android tablet running Firefox! First everything slowed down,
then the status bar disappeared, then... black screen. Had to restart.

~~~
cjmcqueen
I'm genuinely surprised my Pixel 3 phone had no problems with it in Chrome.
That was a lot of video.

------
23d
Video background removal, when hair is involved, is painful. Clearly this is
not targeted at webcam footage. Anyone who has had to manually remove a
background using a tool like Premiere or After Effects from pre-recorded video
would see the benefit of this tool/api. It is pricey but i can see motion
graphics studios using this regularly.

------
KingOfCoders
€ 1.98 / minute - wow.

~~~
slezyr
It's for 30 FPS. And only up to 1080p.

> Up to 30 fps: Base price

> 30-60 fps: Base price × 2

> 60-90 fps: Base price × 3

~~~
londons_explore
That pricing looks very much "what it costs to run the service, plus some
profit margin".

A service run by anyone with any business acumen will charge what customers
will pay, modified for benefits that customer brings the company (like
referrals, bigger revenue leading to a higher company valuation, etc.).

None of that depends on the frame rate or resolution.

~~~
kfarr
Video processing tools in the cloud very regularly use frame rate and
resolution as pricing inputs, similar to GB with storage solutions

------
md5person
I think some of the artifacts on the video at 0:12 (handbag thing) are very
noticeable. Same thing at 0:19 (cat)and at 0:28 (cat again). Otherwise, looks
nice :)

~~~
groe
Some scenes, foregrounds, backgrounds, lighting conditions, movements, etc
work better than others - there's a lot of potential for errors in videos and
the videos from the examples page are straight from Unscreen Pro. We're
continuously working on improving the AI though (NB: We don't use video
uploads for that - see unscreen.com/privacy)

------
SEJeff
This is sort of the inverse of gimp's "foreground select tool". It was a PHD
thesis on the algorithm to select foregrounds that was contributed to the gimp
photo editor as open source.

[https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-tool-foreground-
select.html](https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-tool-foreground-select.html)

And the paper with an overview of the algorithm is here: "Image segementation
by uniform color clustering"

[https://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/inst/pubs/tr-b-05-07.pdf](https://www.inf.fu-
berlin.de/inst/pubs/tr-b-05-07.pdf)

------
CyberDildonics
This is an area of research called natural image matting that has been going
on for over 20 years.

Some influential papers include:

[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-
content/uploads/...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-
content/uploads/2016/02/poissonmatting_siggraph04.pdf)

[https://webee.technion.ac.il/people/anat.levin/papers/Mattin...](https://webee.technion.ac.il/people/anat.levin/papers/Matting-
Levin-Lischinski-Weiss-CVPR06.pdf)

------
thekevan
I feel like this could be presented in a much more engaging manner.

There's one quick video on the main page which shows replacement backgrounds,
but the "Examples" page shows about 15 or 16 examples of the same thing,
removing a background. It quickly gets to the point of "Ok yeah, so what? Show
me something cool to do once the background is gone."

I get that it may be difficult to remove a background the way this service
does, but the customer is going to be less impressed with the fact that it
works correctly than they are going to be about it having an actual engaging
or useful purpose.

~~~
manmal
You can try it with an uploaded video or GIF here:
[https://www.unscreen.com/upload](https://www.unscreen.com/upload)

------
bryanrasmussen
Since it doesn't do live video so no chat background virtual camera tools -
but what if you did a video in the area you wanted to remove could you then
use that for some sort of baseline for removing the background? So you do a
video in the area you want to use your virtual camera in, and then when you're
live it knows what the actual 'background' looks like so it can be used to
remove live.

~~~
manmal
If you can keep the camera at a fixed position, that’s surely a great option.
I think that’s not the use case this tool is for. A green screen would also
work obv.

------
billconan
I want to integrate your service to remove background for product images.
However, not everything works well, especially when background and foreground
color are close.

that's fine. The thing is that on the website, there is a tool to fix
imperfect results, but with the api, there is no such tool.

~~~
groe
Since you mention images I assume you are referring to remove.bg, not
unscreen.

We're working on an SDK that will allow for editing on external sites. You can
sign up to our mailing list if you want to get notified when it's ready:
[https://www.remove.bg/blog#subscribe](https://www.remove.bg/blog#subscribe)

------
groe
Thanks a lot for your comments and feedback - some great great advice and
ideas in here!

This is the MVP release of Unscreen Pro, so there's many more things to come
in the future, from quality improvements, to an API, integrations, editing
tools and more. Appreciate all the inputs :)

------
Roritharr
Looking really cool, I just hope a Premiere / After Effects Update won't kill
your business.

~~~
benbristow
At the prices they're charging, they're rather asking for it.

------
wodenokoto
Very impressive results and great presentation.

I imagine this can be useful for business that want to record small 360 of
their products, but not invest in a big Physical setup.

~~~
groe
Thanks! Yes, professional 360° product shots are way too hard to produce right
now and we're aiming make them much more accessible, particularly for smaller
vendors

------
pmarreck
the autoplaying movies are massacring my crappy cell internet connection

(my home is currently one of the hundreds of thousands without power on the US
east coast)

~~~
aembleton
Set uBlock Origin to block media elements larger than 50KB or whatever
threshold you want. More info: [https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-
site-switches#no-...](https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-
switches#no-large-media-elements)

------
pabe
Looks great and is exactly what one needs for professional screencasts if she
doesn't want to fiddle around with a greenscreen. Thumbs up!

------
raobit
Looks Great! How tool is built?using computer vision,image processing?

~~~
groe
It's a combination of deep learning and traditional computer vision
algorithms. We do a lot of basic research, evaluate many different approaches,
train them in dozens of variants and ultimately combine what performs best,
then try to make it as easy to use as possible

------
dandigangi
Whats the tech stack this was built on?

------
Asuchug4
Somehow I parsed the title as next-gen adblock. Well, it is great to see the
required technology is already here.

------
LyalinDotCom
How long before this is used to help fake political videos from existing
footage. Sigh

------
dirtyid
Need longer demos to show temporal contiguity.

~~~
manmal
I think processing is done frame per frame.

------
daertommy
Product hunt is full of this kind of stuff, is there anything different on
this project?

------
jacknews
$1.98 per MINUTE?

I thought I'd woken up in 1980.

But I guess this is aimed at people making professional video presentations
etc rather than for webcam meetings.

It seems to work pretty well, but none of the examples have any sudden
movement, which is where there's often tearing etc.

~~~
Insanity
It works on pre-recorded video so webcam meetings are not their target market.

~~~
jacknews
Exactly as I concluded, and said above.

