This App Can Remove People From Pictures

Bye Bye Camera is an app on iOS that allow users to remove people from pictures. Damjanski, a New York-based artist, said that this app is for the “Post-human world:”

The app has its own flaws, and its work can sometimes be messy. If you want to do anything serious like removing someone from a picture because you do not want him or her to be there, Photoshop will be a better option.

Damjanski is part of Do Something Good, a place for artists and coders to work together to do projects. By Bye Camera is one of these products of this collaboration.

The app uses YOLO, an object detection algorithm to detect people, and AI to fill in their absence. This kind of painting algorithms is quite common, though. Nvidia has tools that can make buildings and landscapes according to drawings.

The app might not do a good job removing people from pictures, but it speaks volume of the future of this technology. In 2017, there was an app called FaceApp that could swap people genders and ages. Two years later, Snapchat offers a similar filter on its app.

Damjanski said that he considered the app an artistic tool:

The post-human part of the app was just a joke, he said. However, Bye Bye Camera was actually inspired by climate changes and other consequences of our actions.