Background Bouncer

The background's not on the list.

Drop in a photo and the bouncer checks the guest list: your subject stays, down to the last strand of hair, fur, or whisker, and everything behind it gets walked to the door. What comes back is a clean transparent PNG, ready for a new backdrop, a thumbnail, or a sticker.

No uploads. No accounts. No line. The whole door runs on your device. 🕴️

Runs entirely in your browser. Your photo is never uploaded or stored: no requests, no analytics. The model downloads once (about 40 MB) and works offline after that.

Bounce the background

Drop a photo here, paste one, or

JPG, PNG, or WebP. The first run downloads the model (about 40 MB), then it is cached for offline use.

How the vanishing works

A photo does not say which pixels are the subject, so the tool asks a neural network. BiRefNet, the high-resolution segmentation model from Zheng Peng and colleagues' Bilateral Reference research, studies the whole picture and paints a probability map: this pixel is the dog, this pixel is the floor. It is unusually good at the hard cases, a pale hand against pale wood or a single strand against a bright sky, where a lighter model gives up and leaves a smudge.

The map is sharp, but the model reads your photo on a square working canvas, so its edges are only as fine as that canvas allows. A second pass fixes this: a guided filter reads the actual edges of your photo at full detail and re-attaches the mask to them, which is how single hairs and whiskers make it into the cutout. A final curve snaps the sure areas fully solid or fully clear, leaving softness only where the photo itself is soft.

Everything runs on ONNX Runtime compiled to WebAssembly, in a worker, so the page stays responsive while the network thinks. A photo takes several seconds on a modern laptop, a little longer on a phone: the model is studying every pixel on your own processor, not a server farm.

Private by construction

Background removal sites usually mean uploading your photo to someone's server. This one cannot upload anything: the page's Content Security Policy sets connect-src 'self', so the browser itself refuses any request except fetching the page's own files. Family photos, ID pictures, unreleased product shots: they all stay in your RAM and nowhere else.

After the first run the model is cached, and the whole tool works with the network cable pulled out.

Frequently asked questions

Why I built this

Every background remover I tried either wanted my photo on their server, my email on their list, or my card for the non-watermarked version. The models that do this work are open research; the runtime that executes them ships in every browser. The only thing missing was a page that puts them together and then leaves you alone. So this is that page: no upload, no account, no watermark, no bill.