simple-background-remover 0.0.1

A quick and dirty background remover for simple images with solid(ish) background colors.

simple_background_remover

This library is meant to be a quick and dirty background remover for simple images with solid(ish) background colors. Basically, a green screen. It does not have any sort of 'foreground detection'; it simply transparent-ifies pixels which are similar to the provided (or determined) background color.

The processed files automatically get saved as PNGs.

Usage

from simple_background_remover import remove_background

remove_background(input_filename='images/myPhoto.jpg',
                  output_filename='images/processed/myPhoto', 
                  wiggle_room=0.15, 
                  background_color=(0, 0, 0))

wiggle_room

wiggle_room is an optional parameter between 0 and 1. It determines how similar a pixels color can be to the background color and still be considered 'background'. For example, a value of 0.2 means that pixels can be +/- 20% similar to the background color and still be considered background pixels, and therefore made transparents. Note: This 20% range is applied to the R, G, and B value of the background color, so it's not perfect. Ideally it would use redmean/Euclidean distance like the auto-generated wiggle_room (more on that below) uses.

If wiggle_room is not passed/left as None, the wiggle room will be auto-determined by roughly calculating the contrast between the average foreground and background color. The larger the contrast (i.e. foreground black, background white), the higher wiggle_room can be. The smaller the constrast (i.e. foreground black, background dark gray), the lower wiggle_room must be, otherwise you risk accidentally transparent-ifying foreground pixels.

background_color

background_color is an optional parameter for the background color of the image (passed as an RGB color, as tuple[int, int, int] -- i.e. (0, 0, 0) for white). If not passed background_color will be estimated based on the average color of the top left 5% of the image. Ideally this could be flexible for the caller in the future.

Examples

• To do: post some images

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Todo

Lots more can be done to improve this repo.

• General clean up -- I wrote this pretty quickly and many places could be cleaned up/refactored
• Validation on user inputs
• Improvements on the auto determination of background color and wiggle room
  • Could use the redmean to determine the closeness to background per pixel instead of doing +/- wiggle room -- although may be very slow
  • Allow user to pass in which corner to read background from