If you’ve ever needed to quickly remove the background from an image, you know it can be tedious, even with access to software like Photoshop. Well, Remove.bg is a single-purpose website that uses AI to do the hard work for you. Simply upload any image and the site will automatically identify the people in it, crop the foreground, and allow you to download a PNG file of your theme with a transparent background. Easy.
It’s the latest example of how once cutting edge machine learning techniques are becoming simple tools for the consumer. In the case of removing the background from an image, there are already some open source algorithms that can handle this particular task. Remove.bg has simply turned them (or something like that) into a free online utility.
Other similar tools include Deepart.io, which styles one image (such as a painting) to another, and LetsEnhance.io, which uses AI to automatically enlarge images.
Remove.bg is certainly not flawless. Like any magic wand tool, it gets a bit confused when faced with fuzzy boundaries between foreground and background. You can see that in the photo of Elon Musk at the top of the article (look at his missing eye part) and with this photo of Miles Davis on a furry quilt:
But it is certainly robust enough to handle a wide range of images, and while the site claims the tool only works with people, may handle other topics, as long as they are clearly in the foreground:
Anyway. It’s a simple little utility that can come in handy for marking. It saves time and can produce some pretty funny picture macros without any hassle.
