Remove background from a directory of JPEG images

Question

I wrote a code to remove the background of 8000 images but that whole code is taking approximately 8 hours to give the result.

How to improve its time complexity? As I have to work on a larger dataset in the future.

from rembg import remove
import cv2
import glob
for img in glob.glob('../images/*.jpg'):
   a = img.split('../images/')
   a1 = a[1].split('.jpg')
   try: 
     cv_img = cv2.imread(img)
     output = remove(cv_img)
   except:
     continue
   cv2.imwrite('../output image/' + str(a1[0]) + '.png', output) 

Answer 1

Performance

This is a simple loop, and I would expect that the majority of time is spent in rembg.remove() - but you should profile to demonstrate that.

If my guess is correct, and if that method is single-threaded, the simplest approach is to divide the work across more cores, to process images in parallel.

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General code review

PEP-8 recommends that indentation should be 4 spaces per level, rather than variously 2 and 3.

Some of the names could be better - img is actually the input filename; it's not an image until we read it. a and a1 are utterly meaningless.

Instead of using string.split() to compose the output filename, we can use os.path or pathlib.

I think that except: continue isn't very useful error handling. You probably want to have some messages on the error stream indicating which files weren't converted, and possibly also write a log file.

I would probably move the cv2.imwrite() within the try block too - if that fails, we want to know about it.

We can get a cleaner implementation, and use this as the basis for parallelising:

import cv2
import rembg
import sys
from pathlib import Path

in_dir = Path('../images')
out_dir = Path('../output image')

for path in in_dir.glob('*.jpg'):
    try: 
        image = cv2.imread(str(path))
        if image is None or not image.data:
            raise cv2.error("read failed")
        output = rembg.remove(image)
        path = out_dir / path.with_suffix('.png').name
        cv2.imwrite(path, output) 
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"{path}: {e}", file=sys.stderr)