21 ms·

Show HN: Unscreen – Automatically remove video backgrounds with ML

215 points by groe 6y ago

Asuchug4 6y ago
Somehow I parsed the title as next-gen adblock. Well, it is great to see the required technology is already here.
sytelus 6y ago
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. 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.
- rbinv 6y ago
  Sounds like that would evolve to become Google AdSense for your home office.
- lawlorino 6y ago
  According to the FAQ this only works with prerecorded video, not live video.
- bergstromm466 6y ago
  > Once you get traction, offer premium background images or videos. Create a marketplace where people can buy/sell. A lot of this seems like guesswork, and honestly also like terrible advice. Maybe if the person had added their experience or a story about their own experience. Like the other person wrote, some advice might be irrelevant because this person hasn’t understood the product to know it’s it’s for existing footage only, not live footage. Sometimes advice can be useful, but be wary when it sounds useful at first glance but includes no examples, and no credentials. Then often it’s someone who considers themselves a success guru, without much sincerity. They just think that their advice is obvious, when its probably outside their domain. It’s not bad faith, it seems to me they’re just a wannabe startup guru/investor/founder/whisperer (what I write here might also be crap). The best advice I’ve found comes with intimate stories of failure. Stories that help you understand the underlying friction, yet aren’t specific to the exact challenges you’re facing, but leave you with solid hypotheses to explore.
  - sytelus 6y ago
    There is a lot of negativity in your response without even deluding to what's really wrong with the advice. There are tons of very successful founders recommending focusing on adoption instead of revenue in initial period. Freemium is very well adopted all over. Literally entire app industry worth billions of dollars use this model. Again, I'm not claiming to be expert in this domain. You are entitled to your opinion and frankly we are all armchair pundits here, however, it's bad form to spew out so much negativity without any reasoning or even alternative.
    - bergstromm466 6y ago
      Yeah I understand where you’re coming from, and maybe my reply broke my own rule of giving advice without a personal story. Where i’m coming from is having listened to advice from people who I looked up to, but who did it to get rid of me (because I was ignorant of protocols/etiquette), rather than being genuinely interested in my project. I’ve learned that the SV world has a high rate of failure and many are hungry, and they try to also carve out a role for themselves, or try to get involved somehow, even if that means they’ll claim competence in an area they’re not competent in. I was more naive then, compared to today, but believing these ‘gurus’ was a painful learning experience for me, because their advice often left me stranded in the end. I’m not negative, it’s more just sharing my disappointments and struggles. Thanks again for your comment, which made me see I kinda broke my own rule
    - abraae 6y ago
      > Again, I'm not claiming to be expert in this domain. Actually nowhere in your original post do you include this "not claiming to be an expert" disclaimer. As a result, when I read your original post, I assumed that perhaps you were an expert as there was no self-doubt at all evident. I think perhaps that's what the allegedly negative post that you are responding to is getting at.
    - Pyramus 6y ago
      >There are tons of very successful founders recommending focusing on adoption instead of revenue in initial period. As of 2020, this is the exception rather than the rule. The problem is that focussing on adoption before focussing on value is very risky. You are constantly flirting with premature scaling before having found product/market fit (see e.g. Startup Genome project). However, successful businesses that have been built on adoption are by-design much more likely to be well known. Again, it's entirely possible to build a business that relies on network effects or economies of scale, but it's not the default advice I would give to founder. >Freemium is very well adopted all over. Literally entire app industry worth billions of dollars use this model. No, you are confusing freemium with advertising here, which is the predominant business model. The challenge with freemium is the conversion into paid, which you cannot predict unless you have proven the value hypothesis already.
- onion2k 6y ago
  The main application of background removal is online meetings and its already well implemented but it leaves a lot to be desired. That's the most obvious case people see right now because we're doing more video calls in lockdown and people see it as a funny gimmick to play with on Google Meet, but background removal has been around for years in the professional video and film industry. Video chat is absolutely not the main application of the technology.
  - abraae 6y ago
    The video chat market though would be approximately a gazillion times larger than the professional video and film industry wouldn't it?
    - onion2k 6y ago
      I have no idea. There's a gazillion times more people doing video calls than make professional videos, but not all of them would be willing to pay for the software and those who are probably wouldn't pay very much. It's the age old question of whether or not it's better to sell something cheaply at high volumes or more expensively at lower volumes.
      - epanchin 6y ago
        Good webcams are hard to find at the moment because people are very willing to spend money on their video calls.
        buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
        > people are very willing to spend money on their video calls. MORE people are willing to spend money on webcams than in the recent past. That is why there is a supply issue. This doesn’t necessarily mean a huge number of people are willing to spend money in it in general. Doubling a relatively small number doesn’t automatically make it a big number.
      - addandsubtract 6y ago
- bioipbiop 6y ago
  There is a reason background removal sucks on chat apps. I fiddle around with the state of the art approaches, it takes a very expensive machine to get to an acceptable frame rate. It wouldn’t scale.
  - mattigames 6y ago
    Would this be a good candidate for P2P? As what if your computer GPU could be used by other app's users to do a small part of such heavy operation? (when your GPU is not doing anything else)
    - theon144 6y ago
      Latency.
  - Roritharr 6y ago
    Can you elaborate more? What are the approaches?
    - aspenmayer 6y ago
      Not OP, and not in this field, so do some more research, I am just sharing what I found: https://paperswithcode.com/task/video-background-subtraction https://paperswithcode.com/task/video-background-subtraction
  - maktouch 6y ago
    I'm pretty happy with XSplit VCam (https://www.xsplit.com/vcam https://www.xsplit.com/vcam)
    - atombender 6y ago
      Anything like this for macOS?
- NicoJuicy 6y ago
  Pre-existing example: Snapchat has an app to apply filters in webcams
- ponker 6y ago
  The quality level here is way beyond what Zoom has or needs. This is a professional tool for creative pros — knocking out an image background is too easy but video is a real challenge. And this kind of work at this resolution would be prohibitively expensive to do for live video ... you’d need a Titan RTX or similar.
- codethief 6y ago
  > I've personally tried half dozen solutions and all fell short in low lighting scenario. Have you tried https://www.remove.bg https://www.remove.bg ? I came across that site a while ago and was surprised how good the results were that I got. YMMV, though. [EDIT]: Looks like Unscreen is actually from the same people as remove.bg. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24058701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24058701
  - groe 6y ago
    We've built Unscreen on top of the tech of remove.bg, at least partly, and the #1 design goal for both products is a high result quality. We've summarized a few of the improvements recently here, if you're curious: https://www.remove.bg/b/introducing-remove-bg-x2 https://www.remove.bg/b/introducing-remove-bg-x2
  - htrp 6y ago
    remove bg/unscreen are pretty much cool ML applications looking for a market
- bitL 6y ago
  This looks like it's targeting pros like me who need to remove background from high-quality videos. The price is completely OK.
- CathedralBorrow 6y ago
  My rule of thumb for advice on the Internet is that if it is mostly in the form of statements like "You need to do X, Y and Z" and has very few questions intended to dig deeper into the nuances of the product and business model... then it's not generally worth much at face value. Essentially: The less information a person needs to dish out advice, the less value I am going to place on their advice.
  - bergstromm466 6y ago
    haha you said what i wanted to say in a way more concise way. nice one
- dividuum 6y ago
  > 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. https://www.xsplit.com/vcam https://www.xsplit.com/vcam does exactly that already and is available on demand or for a lifetime license of $40. It works mostly ok. Unscreen's quality seems a lot better though.
- jchook 6y ago
  Reading “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries. He argues that this kind of “build it; they will come” aka “Just Do It” business process is a recipe for failure because you make a lot of untested assumptions about your market, and front-load a ton of (often wasteful) work. He suggests the “Build, measure, learn” feedback loop, which you actually plan backwards: 1. Figure out what you need to learn by outlining the key assumptions, including your value hypothesis and growth hypothesis. 2. Decide how you will measure your success in validating (or invalidating!) those assumptions with science (eg he calls his method “innovation accounting”). 3. Build the smallest experiments (or MVPs) that will allow you to learn the things you need to learn. 4. Make adjustments to your hypothesis, rinse, and repeat. Another common theme, “get out of the building” and actually speak with all kinds of potential customers. Since a start-up operates in an environment of high uncertainty they cannot rely on traditional planning. Anyway I love reading the book and learning about the early days of Intuit, Dropbox, etc and how sometimes the way to make the most progress feels very counter-intuitive. It almost feels like a real world version of Stochastic Gradient Descent for businesses to mechanically gravitate to various local minima on an invisible failure landscape.
  - bitL 6y ago
    The price and business model is perfectly fine: 1) most pros use green screens for background removal 2) for (rare) shots where background needs to be removed and green screen cannot be applied, a high quality removal like the one here is needed 3) for such rare occurrences, charging higher amount of money is completely appropriate and no reasonable pro would complain as it would save them additional costs of re-shooting the scene completely or doing the removal manually 4) nobody has anything similar, so they can charge premium while it's possible Given what I mentioned I'd say their price is too low anyway.
  - cvhashim 6y ago
    Also recommend "The Mom Test".
- Hydraulix989 6y ago
  Right, this seems like a feature, not a product -- and it's not difficult to replicate. ML is becoming more and more of a commodity these days.
- isochronous 6y ago
  The very first thing I thought when I saw this wasn't "ooh, cool tech for voice chat", it was "man, the special effects industry will KILL for this - no more manually going through every frame of an effects shot and painstakingly removing background elements!" So basically, I think the main assumption on which you built the rest of your advice is flawed.
- manmal 6y ago
  I don’t think it’s feasible to do this level of processing in real-time _for free_.
KingOfCoders 6y ago
€ 1.98 / minute - wow.
- slezyr 6y ago
  It's for 30 FPS. And only up to 1080p. > Up to 30 fps: Base price > 30-60 fps: Base price × 2 > 60-90 fps: Base price × 3
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    That pricing looks very much "what it costs to run the service, plus some profit margin". A service run by anyone with any business acumen will charge what customers will pay, modified for benefits that customer brings the company (like referrals, bigger revenue leading to a higher company valuation, etc.). None of that depends on the frame rate or resolution.
    - kfarr 6y ago
      Video processing tools in the cloud very regularly use frame rate and resolution as pricing inputs, similar to GB with storage solutions
- eps 6y ago
  I'm guessing the OP aims at professional, high-quality video editing rather than at a hobby use. Which is probably the right thing to do as there are low-quality free options already. Hard to compete with that.
  - crooked-v 6y ago
    Wouldn't somebody doing professional video rather use a green screen instead, though?
tsherr 6y ago
Looks very impressive, but it seems cripplingly expensive. 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.
- rplnt 6y ago
  The application of this would probably be different from what your use case is (since you can use green screen).
  - hadeson 6y ago
    Most kinds of professional applications I could think of would better off with a green screen. On the other hand, using this for editing videos in the wild with messy background still not good enough.
victornomad 6y ago
Looks very impressive, but please do not autoplay all the videos at once on the website. My computer fans started to spin like crazy!
- mmwelt 6y ago
  It killed my Android tablet running Firefox! First everything slowed down, then the status bar disappeared, then... black screen. Had to restart.
  - cjmcqueen 6y ago
    I'm genuinely surprised my Pixel 3 phone had no problems with it in Chrome. That was a lot of video.
mobilio 6y ago
From same authors that make tool for removing backgrounds from images - remove.bg It was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697601
- Jaruzel 6y ago
  BEWARE. remove.bg seems to have a malware/fake Chrome update popup.
  - TonyTrapp 6y ago
    Fresh Chromium installation, no adblocking or other content blocking plugins. Zero advertisements and popups on that site. I keep reading these kind of comments on HN and everytime it seems to be only that one person reporting the problem that sees that behavior. Are you sure your network is not compromised?
    - noja 6y ago
      Perhaps the GP is receiving malware through a targeted or non-targeted advertising campaign.
    - Jaruzel 6y ago
      > Are you sure your network is not compromised? It's definitely not. Also used 3 different browsers - each one showed the same dialog but with the name and version of that browser. It doesn't happen on my mobile over WiFi (rules out network injection). This is what I'm seeing: https://imgur.com/a/o9PNmaU https://imgur.com/a/o9PNmaU It's being inserted via a .js file on static.remove.bg: https://static.remove.bg/remove-bg-web/38c6be57b031c26a2186be68133e5eeaec32f4b7/packs/js/application-b38f0b2216d2fa06c6dc.js https://static.remove.bg/remove-bg-web/38c6be57b031c26a2186b... (search for 'out of date' ) So either the site owner is complicit, or they've been hacked. Edit: Fired up a VM of Windows 7 - Same message - so unless my routers been hacked to inject that script somehow, i'm 99% certain it's not me.
      - 6y ago
wodenokoto 6y ago
Very impressive results and great presentation. 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.
- groe 6y ago
  Thanks! Yes, professional 360° product shots are way too hard to produce right now and we're aiming make them much more accessible, particularly for smaller vendors
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jacknews 6y ago
$1.98 per MINUTE? I thought I'd woken up in 1980. But I guess this is aimed at people making professional video presentations etc rather than for webcam meetings. It seems to work pretty well, but none of the examples have any sudden movement, which is where there's often tearing etc.
- Insanity 6y ago
  It works on pre-recorded video so webcam meetings are not their target market.
  - jacknews 6y ago
    Exactly as I concluded, and said above.
Roritharr 6y ago
Looking really cool, I just hope a Premiere / After Effects Update won't kill your business.
- benbristow 6y ago
  At the prices they're charging, they're rather asking for it.
md5person 6y ago
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 :)
- groe 6y ago
  Some scenes, foregrounds, backgrounds, lighting conditions, movements, etc work better than others - there's a lot of potential for errors in videos and the videos from the examples page are straight from Unscreen Pro. We're continuously working on improving the AI though (NB: We don't use video uploads for that - see unscreen.com/privacy)
godmode2019 6y ago
Looks cool, this model is start of the art I believe https://app.wandb.ai/stacey/greenscreen/reports/Two-Shots-to-Green-Screen-Collage-with-Deep-Learning--VmlldzoxMDc4MjY https://app.wandb.ai/stacey/greenscreen/reports/Two-Shots-to...
- motoboi 6y ago
  I believe this is homegrow from their photo background-removal tool remove.bg Probably frame by frame, not real-time. But not less impressive.
pmarreck 6y ago
the autoplaying movies are massacring my crappy cell internet connection (my home is currently one of the hundreds of thousands without power on the US east coast)
- aembleton 6y ago
  Set uBlock Origin to block media elements larger than 50KB or whatever threshold you want. More info: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-large-media-elements https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...
23d 6y ago
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.
pabe 6y ago
Looks great and is exactly what one needs for professional screencasts if she doesn't want to fiddle around with a greenscreen. Thumbs up!
dirtyid 6y ago
Need longer demos to show temporal contiguity.
- manmal 6y ago
  I think processing is done frame per frame.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
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.
- manmal 6y ago
  If you can keep the camera at a fixed position, that’s surely a great option. I think that’s not the use case this tool is for. A green screen would also work obv.
cateye 6y ago
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. Snapchat filters are even more impressive and it is magnitudes more difficult and time consuming to get similar results in After Effects. 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. Adobe really needs to implement new features for this because the expectations are changed by these apps and the bar is much higher.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  In my experience zoom does a horrible job. It's a flickering mess, half the head is missing, etc. Perhaps in great lighting conditions it's better.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- manmal 6y ago
  IMO Zoom‘s background removal is not good at all. It‘s surely way lighter CPU-wise.
billconan 6y ago
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. 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.
- groe 6y ago
  Since you mention images I assume you are referring to remove.bg, not unscreen. We're working on an SDK that will allow for editing on external sites. You can sign up to our mailing list if you want to get notified when it's ready: https://www.remove.bg/blog#subscribe https://www.remove.bg/blog#subscribe
dandigangi 6y ago
Whats the tech stack this was built on?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
CyberDildonics 6y ago
This is an area of research called natural image matting that has been going on for over 20 years. Some influential papers include: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/poissonmatting_siggraph04.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... https://webee.technion.ac.il/people/anat.levin/papers/Matting-Levin-Lischinski-Weiss-CVPR06.pdf https://webee.technion.ac.il/people/anat.levin/papers/Mattin...
daertommy 6y ago
Product hunt is full of this kind of stuff, is there anything different on this project?
nixy 6y ago
This has been submitted multiple times as a “Show HN” but as it is a paid service, I guess this is a marketing strategy. https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=unscreen.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=unscreen.com
- abalaji 6y ago
  Doesn't this violate the spirit of Show HN? I thought only the authors could submit them unless they are all authors of the project.
raobit 6y ago
Looks Great! How tool is built?using computer vision,image processing?
- groe 6y ago
  It's a combination of deep learning and traditional computer vision algorithms. We do a lot of basic research, evaluate many different approaches, train them in dozens of variants and ultimately combine what performs best, then try to make it as easy to use as possible
thekevan 6y ago
I feel like this could be presented in a much more engaging manner. 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." 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.
- manmal 6y ago
  You can try it with an uploaded video or GIF here: https://www.unscreen.com/upload https://www.unscreen.com/upload
- groe 6y ago
  That's a great idea, thank you
LyalinDotCom 6y ago
How long before this is used to help fake political videos from existing footage. Sigh
SEJeff 6y ago
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. https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-tool-foreground-select.html https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-tool-foreground-select.html And the paper with an overview of the algorithm is here: "Image segementation by uniform color clustering" https://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/inst/pubs/tr-b-05-07.pdf https://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/inst/pubs/tr-b-05-07.pdf
groe 6y ago
Thanks a lot for your comments and feedback - some great great advice and ideas in here! 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 :)

215 points by groe 6y ago

Somehow I parsed the title as next-gen adblock. Well, it is great to see the required technology is already here.

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. 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.

rbinv 6y ago
Sounds like that would evolve to become Google AdSense for your home office.
lawlorino 6y ago
According to the FAQ this only works with prerecorded video, not live video.
bergstromm466 6y ago
> Once you get traction, offer premium background images or videos. Create a marketplace where people can buy/sell. A lot of this seems like guesswork, and honestly also like terrible advice. Maybe if the person had added their experience or a story about their own experience. Like the other person wrote, some advice might be irrelevant because this person hasn’t understood the product to know it’s it’s for existing footage only, not live footage. Sometimes advice can be useful, but be wary when it sounds useful at first glance but includes no examples, and no credentials. Then often it’s someone who considers themselves a success guru, without much sincerity. They just think that their advice is obvious, when its probably outside their domain. It’s not bad faith, it seems to me they’re just a wannabe startup guru/investor/founder/whisperer (what I write here might also be crap). The best advice I’ve found comes with intimate stories of failure. Stories that help you understand the underlying friction, yet aren’t specific to the exact challenges you’re facing, but leave you with solid hypotheses to explore.
- sytelus 6y ago
  There is a lot of negativity in your response without even deluding to what's really wrong with the advice. There are tons of very successful founders recommending focusing on adoption instead of revenue in initial period. Freemium is very well adopted all over. Literally entire app industry worth billions of dollars use this model. Again, I'm not claiming to be expert in this domain. You are entitled to your opinion and frankly we are all armchair pundits here, however, it's bad form to spew out so much negativity without any reasoning or even alternative.
  - bergstromm466 6y ago
    Yeah I understand where you’re coming from, and maybe my reply broke my own rule of giving advice without a personal story. Where i’m coming from is having listened to advice from people who I looked up to, but who did it to get rid of me (because I was ignorant of protocols/etiquette), rather than being genuinely interested in my project. I’ve learned that the SV world has a high rate of failure and many are hungry, and they try to also carve out a role for themselves, or try to get involved somehow, even if that means they’ll claim competence in an area they’re not competent in. I was more naive then, compared to today, but believing these ‘gurus’ was a painful learning experience for me, because their advice often left me stranded in the end. I’m not negative, it’s more just sharing my disappointments and struggles. Thanks again for your comment, which made me see I kinda broke my own rule
  - abraae 6y ago
    > Again, I'm not claiming to be expert in this domain. Actually nowhere in your original post do you include this "not claiming to be an expert" disclaimer. As a result, when I read your original post, I assumed that perhaps you were an expert as there was no self-doubt at all evident. I think perhaps that's what the allegedly negative post that you are responding to is getting at.
  - Pyramus 6y ago
    >There are tons of very successful founders recommending focusing on adoption instead of revenue in initial period. As of 2020, this is the exception rather than the rule. The problem is that focussing on adoption before focussing on value is very risky. You are constantly flirting with premature scaling before having found product/market fit (see e.g. Startup Genome project). However, successful businesses that have been built on adoption are by-design much more likely to be well known. Again, it's entirely possible to build a business that relies on network effects or economies of scale, but it's not the default advice I would give to founder. >Freemium is very well adopted all over. Literally entire app industry worth billions of dollars use this model. No, you are confusing freemium with advertising here, which is the predominant business model. The challenge with freemium is the conversion into paid, which you cannot predict unless you have proven the value hypothesis already.
onion2k 6y ago
The main application of background removal is online meetings and its already well implemented but it leaves a lot to be desired. That's the most obvious case people see right now because we're doing more video calls in lockdown and people see it as a funny gimmick to play with on Google Meet, but background removal has been around for years in the professional video and film industry. Video chat is absolutely not the main application of the technology.
- abraae 6y ago
  The video chat market though would be approximately a gazillion times larger than the professional video and film industry wouldn't it?
  - onion2k 6y ago
    I have no idea. There's a gazillion times more people doing video calls than make professional videos, but not all of them would be willing to pay for the software and those who are probably wouldn't pay very much. It's the age old question of whether or not it's better to sell something cheaply at high volumes or more expensively at lower volumes.
    - epanchin 6y ago
      Good webcams are hard to find at the moment because people are very willing to spend money on their video calls.
      - buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
        > people are very willing to spend money on their video calls. MORE people are willing to spend money on webcams than in the recent past. That is why there is a supply issue. This doesn’t necessarily mean a huge number of people are willing to spend money in it in general. Doubling a relatively small number doesn’t automatically make it a big number.
    - addandsubtract 6y ago
bioipbiop 6y ago
There is a reason background removal sucks on chat apps. I fiddle around with the state of the art approaches, it takes a very expensive machine to get to an acceptable frame rate. It wouldn’t scale.
- mattigames 6y ago
  Would this be a good candidate for P2P? As what if your computer GPU could be used by other app's users to do a small part of such heavy operation? (when your GPU is not doing anything else)
  - theon144 6y ago
    Latency.
- Roritharr 6y ago
  Can you elaborate more? What are the approaches?
  - aspenmayer 6y ago
    Not OP, and not in this field, so do some more research, I am just sharing what I found: https://paperswithcode.com/task/video-background-subtraction https://paperswithcode.com/task/video-background-subtraction
- maktouch 6y ago
  I'm pretty happy with XSplit VCam (https://www.xsplit.com/vcam https://www.xsplit.com/vcam)
  - atombender 6y ago
    Anything like this for macOS?
NicoJuicy 6y ago
Pre-existing example: Snapchat has an app to apply filters in webcams
ponker 6y ago
The quality level here is way beyond what Zoom has or needs. This is a professional tool for creative pros — knocking out an image background is too easy but video is a real challenge. And this kind of work at this resolution would be prohibitively expensive to do for live video ... you’d need a Titan RTX or similar.
codethief 6y ago
> I've personally tried half dozen solutions and all fell short in low lighting scenario. Have you tried https://www.remove.bg https://www.remove.bg ? I came across that site a while ago and was surprised how good the results were that I got. YMMV, though. [EDIT]: Looks like Unscreen is actually from the same people as remove.bg. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24058701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24058701
- groe 6y ago
  We've built Unscreen on top of the tech of remove.bg, at least partly, and the #1 design goal for both products is a high result quality. We've summarized a few of the improvements recently here, if you're curious: https://www.remove.bg/b/introducing-remove-bg-x2 https://www.remove.bg/b/introducing-remove-bg-x2
- htrp 6y ago
  remove bg/unscreen are pretty much cool ML applications looking for a market
bitL 6y ago
This looks like it's targeting pros like me who need to remove background from high-quality videos. The price is completely OK.
CathedralBorrow 6y ago
My rule of thumb for advice on the Internet is that if it is mostly in the form of statements like "You need to do X, Y and Z" and has very few questions intended to dig deeper into the nuances of the product and business model... then it's not generally worth much at face value. Essentially: The less information a person needs to dish out advice, the less value I am going to place on their advice.
- bergstromm466 6y ago
  haha you said what i wanted to say in a way more concise way. nice one
dividuum 6y ago
> 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. https://www.xsplit.com/vcam https://www.xsplit.com/vcam does exactly that already and is available on demand or for a lifetime license of $40. It works mostly ok. Unscreen's quality seems a lot better though.
jchook 6y ago
Reading “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries. He argues that this kind of “build it; they will come” aka “Just Do It” business process is a recipe for failure because you make a lot of untested assumptions about your market, and front-load a ton of (often wasteful) work. He suggests the “Build, measure, learn” feedback loop, which you actually plan backwards: 1. Figure out what you need to learn by outlining the key assumptions, including your value hypothesis and growth hypothesis. 2. Decide how you will measure your success in validating (or invalidating!) those assumptions with science (eg he calls his method “innovation accounting”). 3. Build the smallest experiments (or MVPs) that will allow you to learn the things you need to learn. 4. Make adjustments to your hypothesis, rinse, and repeat. Another common theme, “get out of the building” and actually speak with all kinds of potential customers. Since a start-up operates in an environment of high uncertainty they cannot rely on traditional planning. Anyway I love reading the book and learning about the early days of Intuit, Dropbox, etc and how sometimes the way to make the most progress feels very counter-intuitive. It almost feels like a real world version of Stochastic Gradient Descent for businesses to mechanically gravitate to various local minima on an invisible failure landscape.
- bitL 6y ago
  The price and business model is perfectly fine: 1) most pros use green screens for background removal 2) for (rare) shots where background needs to be removed and green screen cannot be applied, a high quality removal like the one here is needed 3) for such rare occurrences, charging higher amount of money is completely appropriate and no reasonable pro would complain as it would save them additional costs of re-shooting the scene completely or doing the removal manually 4) nobody has anything similar, so they can charge premium while it's possible Given what I mentioned I'd say their price is too low anyway.
- cvhashim 6y ago
  Also recommend "The Mom Test".
Hydraulix989 6y ago
Right, this seems like a feature, not a product -- and it's not difficult to replicate. ML is becoming more and more of a commodity these days.
isochronous 6y ago
The very first thing I thought when I saw this wasn't "ooh, cool tech for voice chat", it was "man, the special effects industry will KILL for this - no more manually going through every frame of an effects shot and painstakingly removing background elements!" So basically, I think the main assumption on which you built the rest of your advice is flawed.
manmal 6y ago
I don’t think it’s feasible to do this level of processing in real-time _for free_.

KingOfCoders 6y ago

€ 1.98 / minute - wow.

slezyr 6y ago
It's for 30 FPS. And only up to 1080p. > Up to 30 fps: Base price > 30-60 fps: Base price × 2 > 60-90 fps: Base price × 3
- londons_explore 6y ago
  That pricing looks very much "what it costs to run the service, plus some profit margin". A service run by anyone with any business acumen will charge what customers will pay, modified for benefits that customer brings the company (like referrals, bigger revenue leading to a higher company valuation, etc.). None of that depends on the frame rate or resolution.
  - kfarr 6y ago
    Video processing tools in the cloud very regularly use frame rate and resolution as pricing inputs, similar to GB with storage solutions
eps 6y ago
I'm guessing the OP aims at professional, high-quality video editing rather than at a hobby use. Which is probably the right thing to do as there are low-quality free options already. Hard to compete with that.
- crooked-v 6y ago
  Wouldn't somebody doing professional video rather use a green screen instead, though?

tsherr 6y ago

Looks very impressive, but it seems cripplingly expensive. 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.

rplnt 6y ago
The application of this would probably be different from what your use case is (since you can use green screen).
- hadeson 6y ago
  Most kinds of professional applications I could think of would better off with a green screen. On the other hand, using this for editing videos in the wild with messy background still not good enough.

victornomad 6y ago

Looks very impressive, but please do not autoplay all the videos at once on the website. My computer fans started to spin like crazy!

mmwelt 6y ago
It killed my Android tablet running Firefox! First everything slowed down, then the status bar disappeared, then... black screen. Had to restart.
- cjmcqueen 6y ago
  I'm genuinely surprised my Pixel 3 phone had no problems with it in Chrome. That was a lot of video.

mobilio 6y ago

From same authors that make tool for removing backgrounds from images - remove.bg It was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697601

Jaruzel 6y ago
BEWARE. remove.bg seems to have a malware/fake Chrome update popup.
- TonyTrapp 6y ago
  Fresh Chromium installation, no adblocking or other content blocking plugins. Zero advertisements and popups on that site. I keep reading these kind of comments on HN and everytime it seems to be only that one person reporting the problem that sees that behavior. Are you sure your network is not compromised?
  - noja 6y ago
    Perhaps the GP is receiving malware through a targeted or non-targeted advertising campaign.
  - Jaruzel 6y ago
    > Are you sure your network is not compromised? It's definitely not. Also used 3 different browsers - each one showed the same dialog but with the name and version of that browser. It doesn't happen on my mobile over WiFi (rules out network injection). This is what I'm seeing: https://imgur.com/a/o9PNmaU https://imgur.com/a/o9PNmaU It's being inserted via a .js file on static.remove.bg: https://static.remove.bg/remove-bg-web/38c6be57b031c26a2186be68133e5eeaec32f4b7/packs/js/application-b38f0b2216d2fa06c6dc.js https://static.remove.bg/remove-bg-web/38c6be57b031c26a2186b... (search for 'out of date' ) So either the site owner is complicit, or they've been hacked. Edit: Fired up a VM of Windows 7 - Same message - so unless my routers been hacked to inject that script somehow, i'm 99% certain it's not me.
    - 6y ago

wodenokoto 6y ago

Very impressive results and great presentation. 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.

groe 6y ago
Thanks! Yes, professional 360° product shots are way too hard to produce right now and we're aiming make them much more accessible, particularly for smaller vendors

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jacknews 6y ago

$1.98 per MINUTE? I thought I'd woken up in 1980. But I guess this is aimed at people making professional video presentations etc rather than for webcam meetings. It seems to work pretty well, but none of the examples have any sudden movement, which is where there's often tearing etc.

Insanity 6y ago
It works on pre-recorded video so webcam meetings are not their target market.
- jacknews 6y ago
  Exactly as I concluded, and said above.

Roritharr 6y ago

Looking really cool, I just hope a Premiere / After Effects Update won't kill your business.

benbristow 6y ago
At the prices they're charging, they're rather asking for it.

md5person 6y ago

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 :)

groe 6y ago
Some scenes, foregrounds, backgrounds, lighting conditions, movements, etc work better than others - there's a lot of potential for errors in videos and the videos from the examples page are straight from Unscreen Pro. We're continuously working on improving the AI though (NB: We don't use video uploads for that - see unscreen.com/privacy)

godmode2019 6y ago

Looks cool, this model is start of the art I believe https://app.wandb.ai/stacey/greenscreen/reports/Two-Shots-to-Green-Screen-Collage-with-Deep-Learning--VmlldzoxMDc4MjY https://app.wandb.ai/stacey/greenscreen/reports/Two-Shots-to...

motoboi 6y ago
I believe this is homegrow from their photo background-removal tool remove.bg Probably frame by frame, not real-time. But not less impressive.

pmarreck 6y ago

the autoplaying movies are massacring my crappy cell internet connection (my home is currently one of the hundreds of thousands without power on the US east coast)

aembleton 6y ago
Set uBlock Origin to block media elements larger than 50KB or whatever threshold you want. More info: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-large-media-elements https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Per-site-switches#no-...

23d 6y ago

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.

pabe 6y ago

Looks great and is exactly what one needs for professional screencasts if she doesn't want to fiddle around with a greenscreen. Thumbs up!

dirtyid 6y ago

Need longer demos to show temporal contiguity.

manmal 6y ago
I think processing is done frame per frame.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

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.

manmal 6y ago
If you can keep the camera at a fixed position, that’s surely a great option. I think that’s not the use case this tool is for. A green screen would also work obv.

cateye 6y ago

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. Snapchat filters are even more impressive and it is magnitudes more difficult and time consuming to get similar results in After Effects. 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. Adobe really needs to implement new features for this because the expectations are changed by these apps and the bar is much higher.

bonoboTP 6y ago
In my experience zoom does a horrible job. It's a flickering mess, half the head is missing, etc. Perhaps in great lighting conditions it's better.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
manmal 6y ago
IMO Zoom‘s background removal is not good at all. It‘s surely way lighter CPU-wise.

billconan 6y ago

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. 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.

groe 6y ago
Since you mention images I assume you are referring to remove.bg, not unscreen. We're working on an SDK that will allow for editing on external sites. You can sign up to our mailing list if you want to get notified when it's ready: https://www.remove.bg/blog#subscribe https://www.remove.bg/blog#subscribe

dandigangi 6y ago

Whats the tech stack this was built on?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

CyberDildonics 6y ago

This is an area of research called natural image matting that has been going on for over 20 years. Some influential papers include: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/poissonmatting_siggraph04.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... https://webee.technion.ac.il/people/anat.levin/papers/Matting-Levin-Lischinski-Weiss-CVPR06.pdf https://webee.technion.ac.il/people/anat.levin/papers/Mattin...

daertommy 6y ago

Product hunt is full of this kind of stuff, is there anything different on this project?

nixy 6y ago

This has been submitted multiple times as a “Show HN” but as it is a paid service, I guess this is a marketing strategy. https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=unscreen.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=unscreen.com

abalaji 6y ago
Doesn't this violate the spirit of Show HN? I thought only the authors could submit them unless they are all authors of the project.

raobit 6y ago

Looks Great! How tool is built?using computer vision,image processing?

groe 6y ago
It's a combination of deep learning and traditional computer vision algorithms. We do a lot of basic research, evaluate many different approaches, train them in dozens of variants and ultimately combine what performs best, then try to make it as easy to use as possible

thekevan 6y ago

I feel like this could be presented in a much more engaging manner. 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." 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.

manmal 6y ago
You can try it with an uploaded video or GIF here: https://www.unscreen.com/upload https://www.unscreen.com/upload
groe 6y ago
That's a great idea, thank you

LyalinDotCom 6y ago

How long before this is used to help fake political videos from existing footage. Sigh

SEJeff 6y ago

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. https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-tool-foreground-select.html https://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-tool-foreground-select.html And the paper with an overview of the algorithm is here: "Image segementation by uniform color clustering" https://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/inst/pubs/tr-b-05-07.pdf https://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/inst/pubs/tr-b-05-07.pdf

groe 6y ago

Thanks a lot for your comments and feedback - some great great advice and ideas in here! 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 :)