BiRefNet — video background removal

The full BiRefNet variant zoo + ToonOut, applied frame-by-frame to a video. Sister model to the stills endpoint sprited/birefnet. MIT-licensed — free for commercial use.

Highlights

• Transparent output by default — VP9 .webm with full alpha (MP4 can’t carry transparency). Also ProRes 4444 .mov, .mp4 (composited), or .gif.
• Anime / illustration — variant=toonout handles hair wisps, line art, and translucency that general removers smear.
• The whole zoo, one input — general / HR / portrait / matting / dynamic / lite / 2K, swapped per request via variant.
• Controls — cutout or raw mask; refine foreground; grow/shrink/blur the matte; quality and write-mode encoding presets.

Per-frame note: BiRefNet has no temporal model, so fast motion can shimmer slightly between frames — the tradeoff for variant choice + ToonOut quality. For still images and animated GIF/WebP, use sprited/birefnet.

Inputs

• video — mp4 / mov / webm / m4v
• variant — default general
• output_format — cutout or mask
• video_output_type — webm (default, alpha) / mov (alpha) / mp4 / gif
• background_color, resolution, refine_fg, mask_blur, mask_offset
• video_quality (low/medium/high/maximum), video_write_mode (fast/balanced/small), precision (fp32 default / fp16)

Credits

Unofficial community packaging — not affiliated with the model authors; we earn nothing (compute fees go to Replicate).

• BiRefNet — Peng Zheng et al. · MIT · https://github.com/ZhengPeng7/BiRefNet
• ToonOut — Matteo Muratori & Joël Seytre · MIT · https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06839