Show HN: Remove unwanted objects in photos simply by dragging boxes

by gc0119 • 4 years ago

319 118 4 years ago

Cool tool but just as a suggestion, having that example of removing 'Copyright' watermarks is probably a bad idea in terms of legal CYA and just general decency in terms of respecting attribution.

If that is what people want to do with the tool is beyond your control but to showcase it in your example gets you on the hook for ill-intent.

rob74• 4 years ago

Yup, that was my first thought too: people will probably have the idea of using the tool to remove watermarks on their own anyway, but by giving it as an example you are putting yourself in the line of fire.

johndough• 4 years ago

Why would this cause legal issues? (assuming the author owns the rights to the images shown in the preview)

I can think of two related topics:

* Export restriction on encryption (does not apply here)

* YouTube's content policy on hacking tutorials (not applicable here either, since this is not YouTube)

vermilingua• 4 years ago

Because it doesn’t need to be illegal to cause legal issues. All it takes is one wealthy enough, persistent enough, annoyed enough plaintiff, to make your year extremely shitty.

lovelearning• 4 years ago

Some time ago, youtube-dl, a downloader tool for YT, faced legal troubles from RIAA simply for showing a copyrighted video URL in a demo. Something about anti-circumvention. [1]

Given that this project is an alternative to Adobe's features, the latter may feel tempted to claim this is a tool intended for copyright circumvention.

[1] https://commonsware.com/blog/2020/10/24/youtube-dl-avoiding-...

mminer237• 4 years ago

There are different forms of secondary liability for copyright infringement: https://matthewminer.name/law/outlines/3L/1st+Semester/LAW+6...

Particularly, inducement liability could be a real issue here.

In MGM v. Grokster, the Supreme Court unanimously said, "[O]ne who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties."

ekianjo2• 4 years ago

removing watermarks does not remove the copyright...

Closi• 4 years ago

No, but it can aide infringement (just as torrenting a movie does not remove copyright, but trackers can problematic to run).

xwdv• 4 years ago

I say the opposite. At first I didn’t care much for the removal of people, but taking watermarks out of images had me sold.

gc011936• 4 years ago

Thank you @xwdv! Watermarks are certainly one of the main use cases.

bitL• 4 years ago

That sequence can be easily replaced by some other neutral text like "Lake Tahoe" instead of "Copyright" and still most users would get it.

1234letshaveatw• 4 years ago

Why does that sound familiar? Was that in a postcard picture from back to the future or something?

gc011936• 4 years ago

Ah that’s a sharp eye!!

gc011936• 4 years ago

Thanks for pointing out, it’s indeed our own edited photo from Lake Tahoe. Will swap the word with “watermark”. Appreciated!

test1-test1• 4 years ago

Superb, works nicely for a test run that I did.

gc011936• 4 years ago

Thanks for testing it out!!

remedan• 4 years ago

This is a bit of a tangent, but when I opened the page, the heading looked like this: https://i.imgur.com/mYHKd0Q.png

Turns out the Font family is specified as "Copperplate, Papyrus, fantasy" and my system didn't have any font that matched. Fixed it by installing the Impact font, as it matches "fantasy".

speps• 4 years ago

That's a bold choice of default fonts...

netsharc• 4 years ago

Aren't those the fonts used in one of the MS Frontpage's standard homepage templates? (Can anyone from the 90's confirm?)

chucksmash2• 4 years ago

Total tangent but Imgur simply does not load on Firefox for Android now? Linked page just spins forever "loading" the linked image until I request Desktop Site, at which point it happily loads.

An image hosting site that cannot (errrrr, "cannot") display images. Imagine.

Boltgolt• 4 years ago

Worka absolutely fine for me with Firefox for Android 102

gc011936• 4 years ago

Fixed, thanks a bunch!

orobinson• 4 years ago

I remember when the smart object removal feature was added to photoshop and it was pretty cool. The fact that you can now get the same functionality working even better in a free browser tool is mind blowing.

gc011936• 4 years ago

Thank you for your kind words @orobinson!

Wistar4• 4 years ago

"Even better" is an understatement. This straight blows the Photoshop smart object removal out of the water.

mbforbes• 4 years ago

Really nice. I tried removing someone behind a wire grate, and it correctly identified them, replaced the wire grate and filled in the grate holes with decent background imitation.

gc011936• 4 years ago

Thank you @mbforbes!

brk3• 4 years ago

I tried with a moderately complex image [0] and it failed to properly remove anything.

Edit: saw matsemann's comment - I was using Firefox, where selecting areas and clicking remove did nothing. Tried Chrome and got the same result of progress bar and then broken image. Same result in Safari. All on MacOS.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/mbEnZYD.jpg

gerwim• 4 years ago

Must be HN hugged to death. API responses are returning status code 500.

brk3• 4 years ago

OK. Everybody close the tab for a minute, I want to try it.

ape4• 4 years ago

It only works for beaches ;)

brk3• 4 years ago

I thought that might be the case which is why I tried a beach pic. Might have only been QA'd with one specific beach.

virtualritz• 4 years ago

Completely unusable on mobile for me. Is this expected?

sscarduzio• 4 years ago

Broken in my android too

sokoloff• 4 years ago

I tried it (several hours ago) on iOS and it worked very well. Others are complaining about HN-induced overload, so it might be that.

gc011936• 4 years ago

Should be back now.

matsemann• 4 years ago

Hmm, in Firefox a progress bar shows for a few seconds after clicking "remove", and then nothing else happens. In Chrome the image disappears and is replaced by a broken image icon.

TimMeade• 4 years ago

Broken here also. Chrome MACOS

mromanuk2• 4 years ago

It's broken for me, too

neilsimp1• 4 years ago

Same. FF - nothing happens. Chromium - broken image icon. If this gets fixed I would use the heck outta this app.

thyrox• 4 years ago

Couldn't find the pricing page. Is this free? What's your business model?

gc011936• 4 years ago

We will definitely keep it free. We are still trying out different business plans and will leave this answer open for now. Sorry for the vague response.

Wistar4• 4 years ago

I will pay for it now for commercial use.

ChrisMarshallNY• 4 years ago

I tried this with the Stalin And Nikolai Yezhov picture, but the algorithm gave me a "question mark."

justsomehnguy• 4 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32086584

KronisLV• 4 years ago

Seems like the endpoints of the service itself now seem to return HTTP 500 for some reason, so once you click on "Remove", nothing happens.

Example URL:

  https://cleanupphotos.com/cleanup/false/NUMBER_GOES_HERE

Response contents:

  Internal Server Error

  The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request. Either the server is overloaded or there is an error in the application.

xtracto• 4 years ago

Aaah, so that's why It was behaving wonky for me.

gc011936• 4 years ago

Apologize for the super late reply and hope you gave it another try.

hansvm• 4 years ago

Nice job!

I made one of these back in the day. Also allowing positive selections gives the model a lot more information and gives the user more power. You can use that to easily remove gridlines and smudge marks in photos of drawings without having to select every little thing you want deleted, or similarly you can positively select the main subject and a bit of scenery, negatively select a few passers-by, and let the model remove a crowd. The key point is that it moves some of the training-time bias toward a runtime selection, allowing better results on a wider variety of tasks (at the cost of more clicks on photos the model understands with few removals happening).

gc011936• 4 years ago

Thanks a bunch @hansvm, certainly enlightened by expert's view!

swyx• 4 years ago

this is an alternative i have come across: https://cleanup.pictures/

Markoff2• 4 years ago

seems to be much faster and more user friendly than OP's site and worked also better on one example I tried

njgroene• 4 years ago

Meant as constructive feedback for OP: the UI is certainly more agreeable on the eyes, and I find the brush selection more convenient than OPs box selector.

Still: great work, OP!

moffkalast• 4 years ago

Ngl both do a pretty great job, OP's may be slightly better even.

Unfortunately both output images at thumbnail quality, so it's an academic exercise only and not anything actually useful.

gc011936• 4 years ago

Thanks @njgroene, will try to improve the UI asap! I agree, most users might only need brushes. Great feedback, helps prioritize important aspects!

kk6mrp• 4 years ago

Why does the text scale with screen size?

gc011936• 4 years ago

We haven't yet tested all the screen sizes so we've built it to look nice on laptops and phones. Please let me know if the texts are showing up weird on your device. I'll make sure it doesn't. Thanks a bunch!

quietthrow• 4 years ago

This reminds me of pixels magic eraser technology which I think is specialized for removing people.

phh• 4 years ago

I'm rather ignorant in that domain, so I wonder if some people could enlighten me. What are the AI tasks behind this?

I can identify two steps:

- Identifying an approximate shape of background vs foreground to get something more precise than just a rectangle. What is it called? Just background detection?

- Actually filling-in the holes. I think this is called a diffusion task? Is that correct? ddg-ing around looks like diffusion is the name of the method rather than the actual task, but I can't find the name of the task.

I'm curious at whether some existing open models would be usable on smartphones to make an opensource app (or maybe there are already such apps I'm unaware of)

drewhayward• 4 years ago

For the two steps you listed it could be image segmentation followed by image in-painting.

Someone• 4 years ago

The technical term is “inpainting” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inpainting), so “inpainting algorithms” will give you papers on various ways to do it.

In general, diffusion isn’t a good way to do it, as diffusion fills in the missing hole with data with fewer small details than the surrounding area.

Modern smartphones are fast enough for implementations.

sbdaman• 4 years ago

Pixel has this built into the OS.

Markoff2• 4 years ago

it works reasonably well on clothes blocked by objects, I suppose not so great for skin blocked by clothes

gc011936• 4 years ago

I've personally tried to remove watches, glasses, small things blocking the skin and they are fine. But for large portions, it won't be good. Someone pointed out things like a better algorithm might give more realistic results. Those are in our pipeline, but they require more hardware resources which might end up as a sign-up service. Similar thing goes to processing higher resolution images.

This is valuable feedback, thank you!

Wistar4• 4 years ago

This produced really impressive results in removing a creased dent in a car door and a pile of rocks from in front of a fence. Both photos were at an oblique angle and I thought the result was good enough for commercial use. I used Chrome on an iPad.

gc011936• 4 years ago

@Wistar We're happy you enjoyed it! Thank you!!

costcofries• 4 years ago

This is awesome, thank you!

gc011936• 4 years ago

Thank you @costcofries!

echelon• 4 years ago

Just an FYI, CloudFlare is blocking this.

jenthoven• 4 years ago

This is a cool version of a suggestive AI product with a great, simple interface for reviewing. Well done -- we admire this type of product at Kapwing, the company I lead.

gc011936• 4 years ago

@jenthoven respect to the hustlers kapwing.com! Thank you!

pbhjpbhj3• 4 years ago

FWIW the tip, "hug the box to", comes across a little awkwardly to me, I'd prefer "wrap the box around".

Although perhaps the emotional implications of using "hug" are worth the unusual nature of the phrase.

gc011936• 4 years ago

Makes sense! Thanks @pbhjpbhj!

michaelchisari• 4 years ago

Of course, I had to test it with this photo:

https://imgur.com/a/ypyIhB3

Not too bad! Can definitely tell it's been edited, but for a quick removal it was painless.

gojomo• 4 years ago

That image should be the 'Lena' of person-removal image benchmarks.

nevf1• 4 years ago

This gave me a good chuckle, thanks!

gus_massa• 4 years ago

It's so good that I though you were making a joke and posting the classic edited photo, but after looking at the wave patterns, they look different. Also the bottom of the other side of the channel is better in your version.

For context: https://www.history.com/news/josef-stalin-great-purge-photo-...

gc011936• 4 years ago

Thanks for the thumbsup on painlessness!

gc011936• 4 years ago

Wow, that's a really dark one! Never thought it could reproduce a piece of history, you made my day.

IYasha2• 4 years ago

Checking your browser before accessing cleanupphotos.com.

This process is automatic. Your browser will redirect to your requested content shortly.

Please allow up to 5 seconds…

Redirecting…

FOREVER.

Thanks for using this garbage service.

gc011936• 4 years ago

We are working on stabilizing the app, sorry for the trouble.

IYasha2• 4 years ago

It's not your fault, it's common to CloudFlare.

tux1968• 4 years ago

I was prepared to be underwhelmed, but it did a very good job on the three photos I threw at it. Very well done indeed.

gc011936• 4 years ago

Thanks for trying it out and the compliments!!

guerrilla• 4 years ago

I guess this will be a slight improvement on people cropping their exes out of pictures on dating sites...

divbzero• 4 years ago

I remember someone made a parody demo video for Photoshop’s content-aware fill where you could take a photo of a messy room and clean it up with just a few clicks! Doesn’t feel far fetched anymore.

gc011936• 4 years ago

Whoot thanks for the comparison!

terrycody• 4 years ago

Really neat tool!

juunpp6• 4 years ago

We are commited to protecting your data privacy. Your photos will never be saved, so please make sure to download after editing. Email support@cleanupphotos.com.

Then why not release an offline version?

gc011936• 4 years ago

An offline version is not yet available. For most users, edge devices most likely won’t be able to handle the computational resources. We’ll work hard towards an offline desktop app, thank you!!

juunpp6• 4 years ago

Well, now you've made me look like an idiot with the original post.

What 'computational resources' are needed here, a 2nd-gen GPU? I think this kind of object removal would be awesome if it were implemented as a Gimp plugin, and even if you needed to wait for a few seconds for the changes to apply. Gimp allows scripting in Python, which seems to be what most DL projects are using these days:

https://gimp.org/ https://docs.gimp.org/2.10/en/gimp-scripting.html

I am just skeptical of any website/backend-locked software that asks for my data these days -- for which we have Big Tech to thank for -- and this is not the first website-only project shared on HN.

gardenhedge• 4 years ago

I tried it but it left a dirty blob where it removed the thing from my photo. A bit underwhelming.

gc011936• 4 years ago

If you see the dirty blob, here are some things to consider 1. Switching between box and brush, in most cases one of them would work better. 2. Box would be preferred for full object removal, Brush would be good for texture retouch, but it could vary some times so try both. 3. The result won't be pretty on big object removal. 4. Remove the dirty blob or "Undo" and box/brush again.

We are working on more advanced backend to get a cleaner job done, sorry for the frustration. Thanks for trying it out and the valuable feedback!

t_mann• 4 years ago

Bookmarked. Thanks OP!

gc011936• 4 years ago

Thanks for liking it @t_mann!

gc011936• 4 years ago

https://cleanupphotos.com provides a mobile/desktop interface for editing photos simply using your thumb/mouse to drag boxes (automatic) or brushes to remove unwanted objects. It’s free!!

Show HN: Remove unwanted objects in photos simply by dragging boxes

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