About Backgroundoff

Backgroundoff is a small collection of tools that do their work inside your browser. The first one removes backgrounds from images. More will follow — the kind of everyday utility you currently have to hand a file to a stranger's server to get done.

Why in the browser

Browsers became genuinely capable at some point and most tool sites never caught up. A modern browser can run a neural network, decode and encode images, and do it fast enough that you do not notice. Once that is true, uploading your photo to a server is a choice, not a requirement — and it is the choice that puts your file on somebody else's disk.

So the rule here is simple: if a tool can run on your device, it runs on your device. If it cannot, we do not build it. That rules some things out. Converting a video, for instance, is not going to happen here. We would rather have a shorter list of tools than a privacy policy full of exceptions.

How the background remover works

It uses U²-Net, an open-source segmentation model published by academic researchers under the Apache 2.0 licence. The small variant is about 4.4 MB, which is what makes it practical to send to a browser. It runs through ONNX Runtime Web, compiled to WebAssembly, inside a background thread so the page stays responsive while it works.

The model gives a rough mask; the rest is ordinary image processing — scaling the mask up to your photo's resolution, hardening its edge, and dropping stray fragments of background that were left floating. When the subject occupies only part of the frame, the model runs a second time on a crop around it, which gives its edges more pixels to work with.

It is not the most accurate model in existence. Larger ones exist that would be far too big to download. When it gets something wrong, the erase and restore brushes let you fix it in a few seconds, which in practice beats waiting on a bigger model.

How it is paid for

Display ads and affiliate links, plus an optional one-time payment to hide the ads. That is the whole business model. There is no plan where your files become the product, because your files never reach us.

Contact

Bug reports, requests for the next tool, or complaints:get in touch.