Segment Anything (sam) promptable segmentation#

Meta's Segment Anything (ViT-B, quantized): segments whatever you point at with a click or box prompt.

Run it: rembg i -m sam input.jpg output.png setup

How to run sam

sam ships with rembg as the session sam. The weights download on first use.

Command line

pip install "rembg[cpu,cli]"
rembg i -m sam input.jpg output.png

Python

from rembg import new_session, remove
from PIL import Image

session = new_session("sam")  # load once, reuse for every image
output = remove(Image.open("input.jpg"), session=session)
output.save("output.png")

Other sessions: all rembg models.

Quick take

Best for: Picking one object out of a busy scene with a point or box
Avoid when: Hands-off batch background removal: it needs a prompt per image
Notes: Not on Bench v0: results depend on the prompt. Without `sam_prompt`, rembg clicks the image center.

When a hosted model is worth it

sam is free and runs on your machine; keep it if the results above are good enough. If you need finer hair and edges, or don't want to run large models locally, rembg also ships the withoutBG Pro Model as the withoutbg session, ranked #1 of 17 by accuracy on Bench v0. Images are sent to withoutBG's servers.

Same command, hosted model

export WITHOUTBG_API_KEY=sk_...
rembg i -m withoutbg input.jpg output.png