If there is one feature on which the entire smartphone industry focuses more and invests resources from year to year, that is certainly the camera, for many criteria of choice when buying a new mobile phone.
The iPhone has always played a leading role in the photo / video sector, and the gigantic App Store is teeming with many apps dedicated to photography, in which BG – Erase photos on background, a software for the contouring of photos deserves particular attention which makes machine learning its workhorse and key to differentiate it from similar apps.
Original Photo 
Final Result
In fact, a sophisticated algorithm allows BG to cut out the subjects from the background in a completely new way, autonomously, using artificial intelligence: ultimately, the software analyzes the image and “understands” what should go to cut out and cut out, both it is a human being, an object, an animal, a plant.
Original Photo 
Final Result
The idea of using machine learning was born from the brilliant mind of its programmer, Matthieu Rouif, in response to the need to quickly create high quality brochures and promotional material, on all those occasions in which it was not possible to use the intervention of a professional graphic designer.
Original Photo 
This time it fails in the hand 
Ultimately, the developer's ambitious goal is to make it easy even for those who do not use Photoshop and for example have a small company, to create their own professional advertising material for the promotion of products. To achieve alchemy, Matthieu has created a skilful mixture of Apple's CoreML and Metal technologies, achieving sometimes surprising results, we would say almost magical!
In the tests we carried out, we fed the app photos that portrayed objects, plants, animals, humans: in several cases the app understood on the fly what we wanted to cut out and performed the operation with a decidedly high accuracy. and wealth of details.
The use of the app is really simple and intuitive: choosing the image from the roll (or taken on the fly from within the app) the result of the contour is immediately shown, the precision of which can be dramatically increased using the HD mode, which, however, unlike the standard cut, allows for better recognition of objects and a more precise cutout of human subjects.
Unlike the standard clipping, the HD one, due to the use of a more resource-intensive algorithm, does not take place locally on our iPhone but uses the cloud, and therefore requires an active internet connection, as well as the subscription to a monthly or annual subscription plan. , respectively of 9.99 euros and 29.99 euros for 12 months with a saving of 74%.
The subscription not only unlocks the HD cut but also gives access to a larger library of filters and scenarios and removes the watermark. The BG app allows you to rotate the cropped image portion and resize it, save it with the alpha channel (with transparent background) for use in other applications, replace the background by choosing from a wide choice of proposals or uploading an image from your library, apply effects to the cut-out subject and / or background.
Obviously, machine learning is not always infallible, sometimes the app does not understand well what you want to cut out, returning unexpected and grotesque results, nor is there a way to indicate which portion of the image to intervene on (on the other hand, if there were, it would in a certain sense minus the magic of this app and its artificial intelligence) and a tool is missing (but it could arrive in the future, according to the developer) that allows you to manually refine the cropped image by selecting and eliminating the portions of no interest.
At the moment there are no versions of BG for Mac and on Android the release times are not known: iPhone is the priority! A version of BG dedicated to videos is already in an advanced stage of testing (here an example in Matthieu's tweet https://twitter.com/matthieurouif/status/1144900740303007744), which opens up really interesting usage scenarios such as the possibility of automatically masking of human subjects in a video or obscuring the license plates of cars, all in real time, but to be exploited to its full potential it will require the A12 Bionic, standard on the iPhone XS and XR.
Original Photo 
Final results
It is evident that artificial intelligence will be increasingly the protagonist in the future of our daily life, and BG represents a tasty taste of machine learning applied to the world of photography, sometimes imperfect and with unexpected results with a few more hands like in the contour of the clock and a few feet less in the plush toy of our test, but which will not fail to amaze us in more than one occasion.
A start, but already promising!
BG – Erase Background Photos is free in the App Store and can be downloaded from here.
