
Show HN: Fully-automatic image background removal tool - groe
https://www.remove.bg/
======
groe
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!

~~~
pietroglyph
Very impressive! It has some issues with uncommon hats though (which isn't too
surprising):

Original: [https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/02/xrichar...](https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/02/xrichard-
stallman.jpg.pagespeed.gp+jp+jw+pj+ws+js+rj+rp+rw+ri+cp+md.ic.9qDC7nl9gF.jpg)

Background removed:
[https://www.remove.bg/system/uploads/image/processed/1c5f1c6...](https://www.remove.bg/system/uploads/image/processed/1c5f1c68-70f2-49a6-8f88-477f7a0b6d65/b_xrichard-
stallman.jpg.pagespeed.gp%2Bjp%2Bjw%2Bpj%2Bws%2Bjs%2Brj%2Brp%2Brw%2Bri%2Bcp%2Bmd.ic.9qDC7nl9gF.png)

~~~
btown
I feel like RMS would be positively tickled to know that his hat had broken a
commercial machine learning API.

~~~
ndnxhs
And disappointed that his photos were fed to it.

------
crucialfelix
We once had to get photos taken in Mumbai. The shop had two guys working
Photoshop to remove the dirt marks from the wall behind us. Why did they not
just paint the wall ? Because the Photoshop artists were part of the service,
so they could charge us for it.

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

------
djsumdog
> 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.

~~~
bschwindHN
It's also just a smart policy for saving money on storage space, and not
getting in trouble when someone uploads illegal content to your site.

------
valbaca
Works perfectly with people! Such a well done and simple tool.

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.

------
vesinisa
At last, an actually useful application of AI!

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!

------
mrburkins
Around 2008, one of my first jobs out of college was working as a photo
retoucher for a retail fashion company. One of our main tasks was placing 3rd
party product shots on a neutral background so that the photography would look
consistent. I was pretty good with it and had a few tricks up my sleeve
(Photoshop Actions FTW!) but it was still pretty time intensive.

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.

~~~
Etheryte
As someone who used to also work in this space, I don't really agree with the
sentiment. The manual cutting part of the work was always the boring and
mundane part and honestly I would've always appreciated better automation in
that regard. Making the rote work automatic leaves you with more time to work
on the creative aspects of the work, it doesn't make it obsolete.

------
snazz
This works really well! It would be nice if it told you it only works on
images with people before you upload an image.

~~~
djsumdog
I knew I wouldn't be the only one to try that. It is neat that it will tell
you that no people are found in your image.

------
codeplea
Care to explain more about how it works?

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?

~~~
manigandham
Usually cheaply paid humans.

~~~
codeplea
That doesn't seem plausible. It works too fast and the results are too good.

~~~
ultrasounder
Perhaps this? Was posted here a few months ago. Going to look into it.
[https://towardsdatascience.com/background-removal-with-
deep-...](https://towardsdatascience.com/background-removal-with-deep-
learning-c4f2104b3157)

------
gaara87
Is there an open source underlying library as part of your service? Would love
to start using it in smaller projects :) great job BTW

~~~
kra34
Given its produced by a ".ai" company I would imagine they are using a U-Net
derived ML model and not traditional OpenCV methods.

You can read more about that approach here:

[https://hackernoon.com/releasing-supervisely-person-
dataset-...](https://hackernoon.com/releasing-supervisely-person-dataset-for-
teaching-machines-to-segment-humans-1f1fc1f28469)

Good results though for sure and very handy for quick image edits.

~~~
Tuxa
Yup. Multiple u-nets, actually.

------
andreyazimov
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?

------
Kye
This worked surprisingly well on a picture of a fursuiter with several people
(no suits) in the background. I didn't expect it to work at all.

~~~
baroffoos
Post a link. I'm interested to see how well it worked.

~~~
Kye
It seems to have been "fixed" for that one photo. Now it pulls out random
people in the background instead of the focus of the picture.

It did work (mostly) on this shot though:
[https://snouts.online/@Kye/101262023246984238](https://snouts.online/@Kye/101262023246984238)

Poor Duke lost his ear...

------
andrewstuart
Worked superbly. I spent hours yesterday manually removing backgrounds from
family pics to have tshirts printed. This did it in a second.

------
sirwitti
The demos look awesome, but unfortunately it works neither in FF 64 nor
Chromium 71 even without adblocker: It keeps saying: "Removing background ..."
and does not show an edited version of the uploaded image.

~~~
Tuxa
we are about to add new servers to handle the load

~~~
make3
you should warn people about the average wait

~~~
Tuxa
agreed. did not expect this interest. should work again.

~~~
robko
Are you already using GPU acceleration? I'm currently working on alpha matting
for my master's thesis and found that it helps quite a lot.

~~~
Tuxa
yup

------
gardaani
Spektral, a Danish company, has been doing this in real-time on iPhone for
live video. No surprise, Apple bought them for more than $30 million:
[https://www.digitaltrends.com/photography/apple-spektral-
aqu...](https://www.digitaltrends.com/photography/apple-spektral-aquisition/)

------
KaiserPro
Ooo now this _is_ impressive.

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.

------
tambourine_man
It's amazing that this can be done automatically, major kudos to the team. The
breadth of what current AI can do is already astounding.

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.

------
ereyes01
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!

------
ultrasounder
Looks good. I got a Unable to upload image when I pasted a URL.
[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.barcablaugranes.com/platfor...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.barcablaugranes.com/platform/amp/barcelona-
la-liga/2018/12/17/18144280/ernest-valverde-says-we-just-have-to-enjoy-lionel-
messi-after-barcelona-hat-trick) May I ask what Your Tech stack is?

------
Hoasi
> for performance reasons the output image is limited to 500 × 500 pixels. We
> are currently looking into ways to increase this limit (...)

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.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I guess for people wanting to get better resolution you could make a mask at
500x500 and then scale that up to your image size, add smoothing to the mask
layer (or vectorise the mask edge) and apply to image of arbitrary size.

------
jansan
Very impressive. Works even on Mona Lisa:
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ec/Mo...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ec/Mona_Lisa%2C_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci%2C_from_C2RMF_retouched.jpg/687px-
Mona_Lisa%2C_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci%2C_from_C2RMF_retouched.jpg)

------
webmaven
Pretty good, though it is not too hard to find images that confuse it:
[https://www.remove.bg/system/uploads/image/processed/6aaacde...](https://www.remove.bg/system/uploads/image/processed/6aaacde8-1592-4997-a9d0-ffcdfea649b5/b_2011-12-27-181003.png)

------
rasikjain
Works perfect. Very easy to use and quick. Last week I was trying to remove
background from image and it took a while to finish the task.

Great job :-)

------
fitzroy
Nice work! Just curious, any reason that the output image is constrained to a
lower resolution?

Also, any thought to handling video in the future?

~~~
groe
Thanks!

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).

~~~
btown
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.

Source: am in NYC.

~~~
Implicated
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.

~~~
sgc
Small business owner. I would use it since it would save me a ton of time and
money on my own stuff.

------
aantix
This is awesome!

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://imgur.com/a/a4jQ5y1)

------
chime
Even works with paintings!

[https://www.remove.bg/system/uploads/image/processed/c9ae8e5...](https://www.remove.bg/system/uploads/image/processed/c9ae8e58-a6d9-403e-9750-2c5ddaee9385/b_041FA711-1239-408E-A494-FBF32B643726.png)

~~~
Moter8
Link doesn't work, as the images get deleted after 60m

------
michaelmior
I'm pleasantly surprised with how well this works. It would be awesome if you
added the ability to pick a second photo to provide a new background. Of
course this isn't that hard to do on my own once I have the background
removed, but saving another step would be great :)

------
matt_the_bass
Nice service! I have. Couple ideas you might consider to make it even better:

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.

------
piyush_soni
Ok it just says "Removing Background", and never finishes that. Is it HN
Effect?

~~~
GrumpyNl
Same issue here.

------
CodeWriter23
There some pretty major color shift in the photo I tried. A lot of red was
missing from the resulting photo.

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

------
imron
> and it's FREE.

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

~~~
icebraining
I'm guessing they'll charge for the API and possibly support for higher-
resolutions.

~~~
imron
That would have been one of my _guesses_ also - but I don't want to guess, and
that info doesn't appear to be available on their site.

------
SonicSoul
Really impressive! as a photographer this is the most time consuming part of
any edit. Just curious, are you doing this with photoshop or something more
low level? Any technical write up would be fascinating to read!

------
datasutra
for people that want to try at home:
[https://github.com/d-grossman/joojanta200](https://github.com/d-grossman/joojanta200)

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)

------
kowdermeister
I've just seen this research on this same subject:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYIQbfnS9jA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYIQbfnS9jA)

~~~
Tuxa
I tried this during development. It works amazingly well but there are also a
lot of downsides: the long processing time is just a minor example.

------
switz
I used to spend hours cutting "renders" of images a decade ago.. and while I
found a few images that confused it, many worked with surprising effect! Color
me impressed!

------
Procrastes
Beautiful. Works great with portrait poses, less well with groups.

------
artur_makly
if you don't bump up the resolution output for this service.. it will be
mostly be constrained to basic website use.

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

------
gesman
Pretty impressive.

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

------
brogrammer2019
How does this background removal tool work? The removal and keeping the people
is really good, far better than I have done in the past manually

------
Kryptoshi
I'm interested to learn how was it done? Works as expected, great work OP.
People like you make me always hungry for information

------
logicallee
Wow!! I only tried this because of the comments here, you guys have got to try
it, this is amazing.

------
kevinsimper
This works pretty well, thanks for sharing, this could be useful for
thumbnails!

------
sophiaraphael
This is the best tool i've come across so far. Thanks a lottttt!

------
l0c0b0x
This is impressively good!

------
WD-42
I was not expecting this to work as well as it did. Great job!

------
ryantbrown
Works amazingly well, and has an even better domain name.

------
jle
Amazing! :D Any information on the tech behind this? :)

~~~
ultrasounder
[https://github.com/facebookresearch/deepmask/blob/master/REA...](https://github.com/facebookresearch/deepmask/blob/master/README.md)
can be implemented in PyTorch for a DL approach or
[https://docs.opencv.org/3.1.0/db/d5c/tutorial_py_bg_subtract...](https://docs.opencv.org/3.1.0/db/d5c/tutorial_py_bg_subtraction.html)
for a traditional OpenCV based implementation

------
usermac
Wow. Fast and it did a good job on my test photo.

------
tobyhinloopen
"Without a single click"

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

~~~
Arnt
As I did, using keystrokes on a keyboard. Do you have any further questions?

------
mzehrer
Does not work with cats.

~~~
wukerplank
It says so in the about section. The AI is trained on people.

~~~
gus_massa
Let's make this a feature request for the version 2.0. People love cats and
dogs.

EDIT: And horses? I guess they are common in photos of trips.

------
ps0305
cool,let me try

------
y4mi
> 100% automatically – in 5 seconds – without a single click

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

impressive service nonetheless

------
protomikron
Nice work, but citing the FAQ:

> 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.

~~~
VvR-Ox
Customers like you don't pay that good, that's why xD

Welcome to the world of marketing where you use phrases like this to attract
customers who don't have a clue about what AI could be but the power to decide
about money.

