At times you want to get a copy of the foreground in a given image so that you can use it in another image, however traditionally that required an expertise in photoshop and a lot of patience. Now, thanks to Johnathan Nader there is an opensource tool called backgroundremover that allows you to remove the background from any image quickly and easily.
Installing the tool was quite simple and on my Debian machine I just had to run the following command:
pip3 install backgroundremover --break-system-packages
The –break-system-packages parameter was included because otherwise Debian doesn’t let you install/update global packages using PIP. Another option to install would have been to install a virtual environment for python and update there but I don’t like doing that, and was fairly confident that this wouldn’t break anything important.
After installation the usage is quite simple, you just pass it the image or video where you want to remove the background and the output filename and the system does the rest. It does take a minute or so the first time to download the models etc but after that it is fairly quick to finish. The command to convert looks something like:
backgroundremover -i inputfile.jpg -o outputfile.jpg
Once the script finishes you have an output file without the background. In my testing if the foreground was large and the focus of the image the system was able to successfully remove the background. In some cases a bunch of background artifacts were seen in the image next to the foreground image but it was still quite good.
It would have been awesome if we could have passed a flag to the program to remove the foreground instead of the background. That would have allowed us to remove photo-bombers or random folks who walked in on a photo being taken. I know there are scripts out there that do this but haven’t really tried any of them out.
– Suramya