Backgroundless runs its AI models in your browser rather than on a server. That means the model files are downloaded to your device, and we are the ones distributing them — so the licenses and copyright notices below travel with the software and belong here, where you can read them.

All of it is permissively licensed. Nothing on this page restricts what you do with the images you create, including selling them or using them in product listings.

Background removal — BiRefNet

Background removal is powered by BiRefNet and BiRefNet_lite, by Peng Zheng and co-authors. MIT licensed — covering both the code and the model weights.

Original model and research: ZhengPeng7/BiRefNet — Peng Zheng et al.
Our standard quality tier uses studioludens/birefnet-lite-512, a browser-ready export by Studio Ludens, whose export method also made our high-detail tier possible.
Our high-detail tier uses jiabins0303/birefnet-lite-1024-webgpu, our own re-export with the model graph rewritten so it runs on WebGPU. Published openly under the same MIT license, with the patches and verification scripts.
Derived from the ONNX export by onnx-community, which builds on Kazuhito00's deform-conv ONNX exporter.

Click and brush refinement — MobileSAM

The Magic Click and brush tools use MobileSAM (Apache 2.0), a lightweight variant of Meta's Segment Anything Model, running through ONNX Runtime Web.

Libraries

Transformers.js (Apache 2.0) — Hugging Face — model loading and inference in the browser
ONNX Runtime Web (MIT) — Microsoft — WebGPU and WebAssembly execution
Next.js (MIT) — Vercel · React (MIT) — Meta · Tailwind CSS (MIT) · Radix UI (MIT) · fflate (MIT)

MIT License

Applies to BiRefNet and BiRefNet_lite, and to our re-export of them:

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2024 ZhengPeng

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.

A note on what these licenses cover

These licenses govern the software. They say nothing about the images you produce with it — an output image is not part of the licensed work, and no license listed here places any condition on it. What you can do with your own images is covered by our Terms of Service, which is short: they are yours.

Worth knowing if you are comparing tools: not every AI background-removal model is licensed this way, and the distinction between a project's code license and its model-weights license is where it usually hides. Some widely used models are published for non-commercial use with a paid agreement required for commercial work. If you sell what you make, it is worth reading the model license of whatever you use — including ours, linked above.

Corrections

If you believe an attribution here is missing, wrong, or incomplete, please tell us and we will fix it — reach us via the contact page.