Best AI Object Erasers for Photos, Ranked
Apple, Google and Samsung compete on multiple fronts – from phones to health apps to smartwatches – and that rivalry extends to artificial intelligence tools. All of these tech giants offer AI-powered object removal features in their mobile photo editing apps that supposedly allow you to get rid of an unwanted person, tree, hand, or anything else that’s ruining your photo with just one or two taps on the screen.
However, just because Apple, Google, and Samsung offer AI object removal doesn’t mean those tools are held to the same standard. There’s been quite a bit of chatter online about how these features fit together, so it seems like it’s time to do a direct test of object removal.
All these artificial intelligence tools work the same way. Obviously, the tools don’t know what’s actually behind the object being removed, but thanks to a combination of clues in the surrounding pixels and image learning built into their underlying models, they can make a pretty good guess. How good this guess is determines the quality of the final result.
This test covers three tools: Cleanup (in Apple Photos on iOS), Magic Eraser (in Google Photos on Android), and Object Eraser (in Samsung Gallery app on One UI). All of these tools appear as options when you open images in their respective applications. For testing purposes I borrowed some great photos from Taan Huyn , Tolga Achmetler and Marek Piwnicki .
(A quick note on the comparison images: there are some differences in resolution due to how I saved them using different devices; this has nothing to do with the AI tools in question, so you can mostly ignore the sharpness of the images.)
What is the best AI tool to remove lamp from a photo?
Our first photography task – photographing the lamp in the image above – is relatively easy in some ways, but challenging in others. There are some useful guidelines for the AI regarding the wall and window, but there are also shadows to deal with (including the shadow of a lamp on the wall behind it, which the AI isn’t smart enough to know needs to be removed as well).
The first was Apple Clean Up . The tool did a great job of identifying the lamp while I was writing over it – I love the glowing effect – and once the removal process was complete the back wall was nicely painted over. Most of the window glass also appeared normal, but a few strange artifacts remained, indicating the object had been removed.
Next up was Google Magic Eraser . The lamp was not identified as a hint to erase, but its selection was quite simple and accurate in terms of boundaries. Unfortunately, although most of the work was done well, the Magic Eraser left traces of the lampshade at the top, like a ghost of what was there before.
Finally, I tried Samsung Object Eraser . Here, the subject selection process was a little more complex—Samsung Gallery is harder to zoom and pan, and the automatic selection was less accurate. However, the demolition job was the best of the three, with both the wall and windows neatly filled in.
Which AI photo tool is best at removing a person from a photo?
Our second task is to remove the walking person from this street scene, and this is not an easy task: the AI must render most of the white car behind our main subject, as well as fill in the road and its markings. What’s more, it’s a darker scene: the foreground is in focus while the background becomes increasingly blurry.
When using Apple Clean Up, the auto-select tool wanted to remove the cars in the background rather than the person in the foreground, but it was easy enough to select. The AI’s shading results were patchy and deteriorated further into the scene as the car behind turned into a pixelated mess.
Moving on to Google Magic Eraser , which also wanted to erase people in the background rather than the foreground. It had some trouble picking out a person on a dark and wet street, and then had difficulty removing the entire person and replacing the pixels correctly. It was borrowing pixels from the wrong part of the overall image, and the tool couldn’t even draw a yellow line consistently.
As for Samsung Object Eraser , the selection process was again a little clunky, but it ultimately did a great job of highlighting the male figure from the background. Then it did a really good job with the removal: it was the only AI that actually got a realistic looking car and road after the human left. While it’s not perfect, at first glance it will probably confuse most people.
What’s the best AI photo tool for removing a bike from a photo?
The third photo task of removing the bike from the scene offers the AI a lot of information it can use in terms of the surrounding field. The barely visible guardrail behind the bike makes things difficult, so I was interested to see if these tools would try to continue the guardrail or just ignore it and walk through the grass.
In this case, Apple Clean Up took several passes to isolate the entire bike, perhaps because it doesn’t look like one object. Once that was done, Clean Up filled in the gaps quite adeptly, although both the greenery and the fence it created showed inconsistencies.
Google Magic Eraser also took several tries to select the entire bike. He attempted to fill in the fence as well as the field, and while the results weren’t catastrophic, there were obvious mistakes—for example, some bicycle wheel spokes were still in place. It was perhaps a little better than the Apple Clean Up, but not by much.
As with the average person, Samsung Object Eraser is better at making accurate choices the first time and doing a better job of putting something compelling into the remaining space. Both the field and the fence were drawn accurately and realistically, and it could easily pass for an unedited photograph.
Final Verdict: Samsung Tool Works Best
The first thing to say is that your experience may vary with these types of tasks – as you’ll see if you look at similar comparison tasks on social media and the internet in general. Every photo has different characteristics, and every AI tool has its own approach to removing objects.
In terms of my tests, Samsung’s Galaxy AI and Object Eraser are the clear winners . The tool seems to take longer to replace pixels, and it actually generates the image rather than simply copying and pasting pixels from elsewhere in the image, like you might see on a car on the street. It’s just an AI-generated image of the car, not the car itself, but it makes the photo look authentic.
Apple and Google were doing well and were at about the same level. Selecting is easy (easier than on the Samsung, in fact) and some simpler removal tasks are handled just fine. However, these AI removal features tend to struggle with complex operations where there are fewer clues about what the background should look like.
Ultimately, it’s unlikely that anyone will change their phone solely because of the AI removal tools it offers, but it’s interesting to see the progress these three companies have made in their AI offerings. It’s also worth noting that Google Photos and its Magic Eraser are available on all Android and iOS devices, forcing Apple and Samsung to keep up (or stay ahead).