Live Background Removal Lite

A gaming-first, high-performance, and crash-resilient background removal for OBS Studio

Overview

Live Background Removal Lite is a lightweight OBS effect filter plugin designed to remove backgrounds from your portrait sources. We make resource consumption minimal to avoid affecting your gameplay, and we always develop this plugin with a priority on stability.

Demo

A cluttered background was removed from my portrait source.

Requirements

• OBS Studio 31.1.1 or later
• OS Windows, Mac, Linux (Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Flatpak)
• This plugin does not require CUDA or ROCm.
• Portable installation is not supported.

Development policy

We prioritize the compliance and ethics of our software projects as a member of the global OSS community, and take the LLM concerns seriously. While we use LLM-based code reviews to ensure that the quality of our software is satisfactory for every streamer, we always avoid including GenAI-generated content in our product, except for translations. See GENERATED.md for more details.

Download and installation

You can get the binary from the project website on the GitHub Pages or the release page on the GitHub repository.

• Windows: Place the contents of the zip file into C:\ProgramData\obs-studio\plugins.
• Mac: Double-click the downloaded .pkg.
• Ubuntu: Install the provided .deb.
• Arch Linux and Flatpak: Use PKGBUILD or manifest available on the supplementary repository.
• Other Linux distributions: Build from source.

Technical details

1. Motion detection reduces a lot of computational cost when the portrait is still.
2. Scaled resolution (256x144) for matting keeps CPU load low and constant.
3. Fast guided filter ^{1 2} is used to improve the quality of the generated mask.
4. Temporal smoothing can prevent the portrait from flickering.

Acknowledgements

This project is built upon and incorporates several open-source components. We are grateful to the developers and contributors of these projects.

• OBS Studio: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio (License: GPL-2.0)
• cURL: https://github.com/curl/curl (License: curl)
• fmt: https://github.com/fmtlib/fmt (License: MIT)
• GoogleTest: https://github.com/google/googletest (License: BSD-3-Clause)
• josuttis-jthread: https://github.com/josuttis/jthread (License: MIT)
• MediaPipe Selfie Segmentation: https://huggingface.co/onnx-community/mediapipe_selfie_segmentation (License: Apache-2.0)
• ncnn: https://github.com/Tencent/ncnn (License: BSD-3-Clause)
• wolfSSL: https://github.com/wolfSSL/wolfssl (License: GPL-3.0)
• zlib: https://zlib.net (License: Zlib)

Uninstalling this plugin

• Windows: Remove %PROGRAMDATA%\obs-studio\plugins\live-backgroundremoval-lite and %APPDATA%\obs-studio\plugins\live-backgroundremoval-lite.
• Mac: Remove ~/Library/Application Support/obs-studio/plugins/live-backgroundremoval-lite and ~/Library/Application Support/obs-studio/plugin_config/live-backgroundremoval-lite.

Footnotes

1. He, Kaiming, Jian Sun, and Xiaoou Tang. “Guided Image Filtering.” IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 35, no. 6 (June 2013): 1397–1409. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPAMI.2012.213. ↩

2. He, Kaiming, and Jian Sun. "Fast Guided Filter." arXiv preprint arXiv:1505.00996 (2015). https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1505.00996 ↩