This has been submitted multiple times as a “Show HN” but as it is a paid service, I guess this is a marketing strategy.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=unscreen.com" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=unscreen.com</a>
If you want to get traction, you need to be far more creative in your business model. The main application of background removal is online meetings and its already well implemented but it leaves a lot to be desired. One thing you can do is to make service completely free. Offer a desktop app that creates a virtual camera that you can use in Zoom, Teams etc. Differentiate yourself by adding features such as much more cool and fun background wall papers or even live videos. Focus on adoption, not revenue. Once you get traction, offer premium background images or videos. Create a marketplace where people can buy/sell. Focus on buyout by big players because ultimately they have the platforms with millions of users where you can provide far more value.<p>Removal of background in images is also big (your site only seem to offer video/gifs). I've personally tried half dozen solutions and all fell short in low lighting scenario. If you are actually doing good here, you can beat competition. There are probably hundred websites out there for background removal for images, none works well.
From same authors that make tool for removing backgrounds from images - remove.bg<p>It was discussed here:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697601" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697601</a>
It's actually quite funny that the Zoom auto remove background does a pretty good job. I can't get the same results easily in Adobe Premiere actually.<p>Snapchat filters are even more impressive and it is magnitudes more difficult and time consuming to get similar results in After Effects.<p>I really wondered if I was missing something so watched a lot of YouTube tutorials on background removal and object tracking and all I see is that it is very laborious and even than not always a good enough results with edge/transparency artifacts etc.<p>Adobe really needs to implement new features for this because the expectations are changed by these apps and the bar is much higher.
Looks very impressive, but it seems cripplingly expensive.<p>I don't play with this much, but when I use my green screen, I'm often doing 15 minute videos, so it is well out of my hobby budget.
Looks cool, this model is start of the art I believe <a href="https://app.wandb.ai/stacey/greenscreen/reports/Two-Shots-to-Green-Screen-Collage-with-Deep-Learning--VmlldzoxMDc4MjY" rel="nofollow">https://app.wandb.ai/stacey/greenscreen/reports/Two-Shots-to...</a>
Video background removal, when hair is involved, is painful. Clearly this is not targeted at webcam footage. Anyone who has had to manually remove a background using a tool like Premiere or After Effects from pre-recorded video would see the benefit of this tool/api. It is pricey but i can see motion graphics studios using this regularly.
I think some of the artifacts on the video at 0:12 (handbag thing) are very noticeable. Same thing at 0:19 (cat)and at 0:28 (cat again). Otherwise, looks nice :)
This is sort of the inverse of gimp's "foreground select tool". It was a PHD thesis on the algorithm to select foregrounds that was contributed to the gimp photo editor as open source.<p><a href="https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-tool-foreground-select.html" rel="nofollow">https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-tool-foreground-select.html</a><p>And the paper with an overview of the algorithm is here:
"Image segementation by uniform color clustering"<p><a href="https://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/inst/pubs/tr-b-05-07.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/inst/pubs/tr-b-05-07.pdf</a>
This is an area of research called natural image matting that has been going on for over 20 years.<p>Some influential papers include:<p><a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/poissonmatting_siggraph04.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...</a><p><a href="https://webee.technion.ac.il/people/anat.levin/papers/Matting-Levin-Lischinski-Weiss-CVPR06.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://webee.technion.ac.il/people/anat.levin/papers/Mattin...</a>
I feel like this could be presented in a much more engaging manner.<p>There's one quick video on the main page which shows replacement backgrounds, but the "Examples" page shows about 15 or 16 examples of the same thing, removing a background. It quickly gets to the point of "Ok yeah, so what? Show me something cool to do once the background is gone."<p>I get that it may be difficult to remove a background the way this service does, but the customer is going to be less impressed with the fact that it works correctly than they are going to be about it having an actual engaging or useful purpose.
Since it doesn't do live video so no chat background virtual camera tools - but what if you did a video in the area you wanted to remove could you then use that for some sort of baseline for removing the background? So you do a video in the area you want to use your virtual camera in, and then when you're live it knows what the actual 'background' looks like so it can be used to remove live.
I want to integrate your service to remove background for product images. However, not everything works well, especially when background and foreground color are close.<p>that's fine. The thing is that on the website, there is a tool to fix imperfect results, but with the api, there is no such tool.
Thanks a lot for your comments and feedback - some great great advice and ideas in here!<p>This is the MVP release of Unscreen Pro, so there's many more things to come in the future, from quality improvements, to an API, integrations, editing tools and more. Appreciate all the inputs :)
Very impressive results and great presentation.<p>I imagine this can be useful for business that want to record small 360 of their products, but not invest in a big Physical setup.
the autoplaying movies are massacring my crappy cell internet connection<p>(my home is currently one of the hundreds of thousands without power on the US east coast)
$1.98 per MINUTE?<p>I thought I'd woken up in 1980.<p>But I guess this is aimed at people making professional video presentations etc rather than for webcam meetings.<p>It seems to work pretty well, but none of the examples have any sudden movement, which is where there's often tearing etc.