Introducing interactive on-device segmentation in Snapseed
Google Research
Google added a smarter object-selection tool to Snapseed on iOS called Object Brush. Draw a line on anything and it isolates it instantly, no manual masking required.
Based on reporting by Google Research — read the original for the full story.
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Selective editing has always been the annoying part of mobile photo apps. You want to brighten just the dog, or pop the color on a jacket, and you end up wrestling with clumsy lasso tools on a screen the size of your palm. Google's answer, rolling out this week in Snapseed for iOS, is a new feature called Object Brush, tucked into the Adjust tool. Draw a rough stroke over whatever you want to change and the app grabs the whole object, cleanly separated from everything around it, so you can edit it on its own.
The thing making this work is a model Google calls Interactive Segmenter, and it runs entirely on the phone. Tap or scribble on a subject and it produces a full mask in under 20 milliseconds, whether that subject is a person, a cat, or a patch of sky. You can nudge the selection by adding or removing bits of the mask in real time, and Google says the actual decoder inference takes just 7.4 milliseconds on an iPhone 16 Pro, thanks to MediaPipe and LiteRT running on the GPU.
Getting there took a fairly elaborate training pipeline. Google first built a large
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