How to remove background from an image using python

The removal of background from an image is the mostly used technique in areas like photo editing, images processing, removing disturbing or noisy backgrounds from the images before showing and products image on shopping websites, preprocessing the data for creating models, this helps to make your images focusing on the actual subject in the image instead of focusing on the background noise and editing with other images, in tasks like object detection, to focus on the main product, to draw attention to products etc.

Here in this article we will learn how to remove background from images using Python and will specifically focus on use cases of this background removal technique. For this process we will be using Python libraries like rembg (Short for remove background), PIL (Short for Pillow library of python).

You can install this libraries using:

!pip install rembg

!pip install pillow

These image processing libraries adds image processing capabilities to your python interpreter so that we can deal with images. Pillow is a very powerful image processing library. If you got into any trouble while pillow installation you can visit the official documentation of pillow.

Now lets dive into the code for actual work, the code is very simple and with 3-4 lines we can remove background from any images. 

Importing the necessary libraries as mentioned above:

Now mention the input and output path for you image based on which kind of storage you are using:

Now pass the input image path of your image to the Image function of the pillow library:

Now using the remove function of rembg package we can remove the background of the input image using the code:

To save the output image you can simply do:

While saving the image as output, one important point to remember is that do not try to save the image as .jpg format as it cannot write mode as RGBA JPEG format. So try to save the image with extension as portable network graphics or .png fomat.

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