[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...

Background removed: https://www.remove.bg/system/uploads/image/processed/1c5f1c6...

[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.

[jjeaff]

If I was asked to cut the background out of that photo, I also would have been confused about that big circle behind his head.

[kawsper]

It's Saint IGNUcius that is on that picture, he is a saint in the church of Emacs, and the halo on his head is an old disk.

[WalterGR]

The drive-by downvotes on HN have truly gotten out of control.

HN needs to again raise the minimum karma required to downvote.

[aruggirello]

Great job! As a note, I think you will likely collect lots of deep links to "missing" pictures over time as your service becomes popular - you already got two such links on this page in a few hours...

[Tuxa]

We are not an image hoster after all. Too many problems would be coming along also.

[joeyespo]

Makes sense!

One idea for the "enter a URL" path. If you save the image URL for a longer time period, you could give the viewer the option to re-run that URL and perhaps save it to that location for another hour.

Or show a message like what Flask's logo does when you right-click it the first time [0]. e.g. "Note: Direct linking will not work. This image will disappear from our servers in an hour." (Possibly with "Click here to post to Twitter instead," which can help "persist" an image while spreading the site a bit further in the process.)

[0]: http://flask.pocoo.org/

[toast0]

You might want to make it more obvious that pictures aren't linkable by doing something like returning the image from a POST (might make for bad UI) or returning the image as a data url.

[dalys]

Hello! What's the bigger app? Are you still working on that and this is just a nice little side project?

[jkukul]

How did you collect the training set? Did you manually process (removed background) from training images or outsourced it via a third party?

[Tuxa]

I cheated a little bit by creating an AI that allowed me to do it faster in a semi-automatic fashion. However, the first batch to train this "labeling"-network was generated manually, which took forever.

[wvlia5]

That semi-automatic AI seems like a useful product as well, for a different task

[logicallee]

Fantastic! great job. On the photo I tried I was holding a water bottle, it between the water bottle and my body it left a small area (inside my elbow) - also between my knees. Given how fantastic it is, if there were a way for you to add a click to remove more parts that it hadn't thought of as the background (in this case between my elbow and body) it might be good. The wall itself in that space was very regular, but I can see why it didn't remove it, it might as well have been a jacket or something, in which case no need to remove it.

The outline of my body that it did make was amazing.