Computer Vision for Efficient Background Removal

Client

The client is a US-based technology company that produces and distributes a hardware solution that consists of multiple cameras. The product is used by many car dealers across the US. It’s designed to take photos of the vehicles that are later placed on their websites for sale. The business goal of the project was to provide an automated way to remove the image background and deliver processed images ready to be placed on the website.

Computer vision application development requires a lot of expertise and effort thus the client turned to us. The client was looking to hire a team with multi-year expertise in picture analysis software development and background removal services.

Challenge: ML to remove vehicle photo background and avoid human interaction with an image

A vast number of vehicle photos on sale have to be placed at the dealerships’ websites. The photos need to have a more professional presentation without the garage backdrop where the photos were taken.

The client used to work with another vendor prior to giving this project to our team. Their previous vendor failed to deliver something tangible. The InData Labs team approached this work with a dataset collection and proper data labelling. We were challenged to create a solution that does contour analysis for image recognition and background removal. The next step was the creation of an ML model that was trained on the collected dataset. Then a pipeline to automate the entire process was set and as a final step in the project, we re-trained the model and made refinements to ensure excellent accuracy.

Solution: a cloud-based solution to process and remove image background. Application of a synthetic background, apply shadows and effects.

The idea behind the project was about removing the backdrop on photos of vehicles located in a garage to create showroom-like images for car dealers. The client requested the solution to be cloud-hosted. The images are being processed and returned via API. At the same time the data is still being collected and the dataset is enriched. So the accuracy is constantly improving. When working on the project, we were using classic image analysis and detection techniques for robust contour analysis for image recognition. For image contour recognition we used neural networks.

Our team developed our own contour detection algorithm for image processing and an artificial intelligence-based background removal tool.

Result: AI-powered background remover

InData Labs, as an image background removal service provider, has aided the client with an automated tool that removes the backdrop of the vehicle photos to speed up the process of the car image previews to be placed at dealership websites. The tool we developed makes vehicle photo capturing very easy, minimizes human interaction and collects images with the same look and feel. Since there is no need for a human-operated backdrop removal work the speed of the car image preparation has increased dramatically.