Background removal is a task that is quite easy to do manually, or semi manually (Photoshop, and even Power Point has such tools) if you use some kind of a “marker” and edge detection, see here an example. However, fully automated background removal is quite a challenging task, and as far as we know, there is still no product that has satisfactory results with it, although some do try.

What background will we remove? This turned out to be an important question, since the more specific a model is in terms of objects, angle, etc. the higher quality the separation will be. When starting our work, we thought big: a general background remover that will automatically identify the foreground and background in every type of image. But after training our first model, we understood that it will be better to focus our efforts in a specific set of images. Therefore, we decided to focus on selfies and human portraits.

Background removal of (almost) human portrait

A selfie is an image with a salient and focused foreground (one or more “persons”) guarantees us a good separation between the object (face+upper body) and the background, along with quite an constant angle, and always the same object (person).

With these assumptions in mind, we embarked on a journey of research, implementation and hours of training to create a one click easy to use background removal service.