Remove Background Color From Image In HTML5 Canvas

I'm trying to strip the background out of a photo image loaded into a HTML5 Canvas. Think of something like a green screen effect. I'm using HTML/JS/jQuery The background of the p

Solution 1:

Have a look at the GrabCut algorithm or GrowCut algorithm; the former describing 'Foreground Extraction using Iterated Graph Cuts' and the latter, 'Image Segmentation By Cellular Automata'. Both those papers will give you a deeper insight into some of the older algorithms used to remove background image data. If you could somehow implement one of those algorithms in Javascript then I think you're most of the way there.

The OPENcv computer vision library (written in c/c++) has plenty of efficient image manipulation methods to examine. You could try and port one of the OPENcv library's BackgroundSubtractor methods (which I believe is partly based on Chris Stauffer and W.E.L Grimson's algorithm) to Javascript and then use that to analyse the background and therefore subtract it, but I think they are based on progressive video frames rather than static images.

The js-aruco project on Google code has ported some of the functionality of the OPENcv library already (codebase is here) so you might want to look there first for some inspiration and then, if you're feeling brave, have a look at how you could program the GrabCut or GrowCut algorithms