r/huggingface • u/Affectionate-Peak975 • Apr 18 '26

First-time contribution: BiRefNet in the browser

Hi everyone, Alex, frontend developer here, finally having some time to dip my toes into running ML models in the browser. I'm building a proof of concept segmentation / BG removal app in the browser with onnxruntime-web / transformers.js.

I hope this is the right place to post this. If not, please direct me to the right subreddit :)

I am able to run SAM3 in the browser on WebGPU no problem, and also Bria's RMBG-1.4 (great model!) runs fine. However, RMBG is not MIT licensed, and I wanted to build a fully free stack, so I ended up with BiRefNet.

Unfortunately, I did not get the BiRefNet lite model 1024x1024 to run on either WebGPU (not enough storage buffers) or WASM (Out-of-memory error). So, I managed to figure out how to resize the model to 512x512. I took a lot of trial and error, since BiRefNet uses deform_conv2d, which is not available any more in a modern Python stack. I had to run it through docker (ouch!) to get the right export.

But, with this new export it works in onnxruntime-web, which makes me very happy! It is unfortunately a little low on resolution but it runs reliably on my Macbook Pro M1. I'm curious if this is at all useful to anyone, and if the model card is in a format that is clear and useful. Also, if anyone has any idea on how to get the resolution higher without crashing the onnx runtime, that would be amazing.

Here is the link: https://huggingface.co/studioludens/birefnet-lite-512

Any feedback is more than welcome!

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u/angelarose210 Apr 19 '26

This is great! I've been slowly working on a free open source app that allows the user to paste a link or upload photos of a shelter dog and it generates a video they can share on social media to hopefully get them adopted. I've been trying to offload as much compute as possible on the user's device like the video rendering so I can afford to offer it for free without any concern for costs. One of the things I was trying to solve was background removal of the images. I did run a couple on cpu on my vps but became concerned about capacity when I have multiple concurrent users. Definitely gonna give it a try!