Samsung’s Object Eraser Can Automatically Remove People From Photo Backgrounds

In addition to its Galaxy S21 Ultra announced earlier today, Samsung also revealed a new feature of its One UI 3 operating system. With one tap, you’ll be able to remove people from the backgrounds of your photos instantly.

While the feature showcase was easy to miss due to the sheer breadth of products and services Samsung announced today, the Object Eraser tool is definitely worth your attention. Samsung prefaced the feature by saying it understands how common it is to capture a great photo only to have it ruined by “strangers” visible in the background.

“Too often, our shots are almost perfect,” the company said during its event.

Example image with unwanted background elements.

To address this, Samsung added Object Eraser, a tool powered by AI that appears to work by combining object recognition with something like Adobe’s Content-Aware Fill. In any photo captured on an S21 series phone, simply tap the button to tell activate Object Eraser, then just tap on the people you want to remove, and then the phone automatically does all the work.

Single taps isolate the unwanted objects.

AI removes those elements and intelligently fills them.

Filling content using AI is always tricky business, especially for particularly busy backgrounds. The example Samsung showed in its brief demonstration actually looked rather challenging, but it will be interesting to see how the technology works in the real world.

You can watch the feature live in the video below (the demonstration begins at 38:23):

Object Eraser is coming to all Samsung Galaxy S21 devices first but is likely to make its way to any compatible Galaxy device with an Android 11 update later this year.

(via The Verge)