‘Apple buys Danish start-up for cutting people from backgrounds’

Apple has reportedly bought Danish start-up Spektral. The company’s engineers worked on a technique to separate people and backgrounds in real time in a camera image. Apple has not confirmed the acquisition.

Apple would have paid 200 million Danish kroner, about 27 million euros, for Spektral, reports Borsen, a Danish newspaper. Spektral started as CloudCutout and has specialized in separating people and backgrounds in live videos. One of the founders of Spektral has since changed his employer on LinkedIn to Apple, where he is working on ‘Computational Imaging’.

It is unknown what Apple wants with the company’s technology. The most obvious application is a portrait mode that works in videos. This is currently only possible in photos. In addition, it will then be possible to cut people out of the camera image in videos and add them to a different background, as a green screen works with TV. That would potentially be useful within Apple’s ARKit platform. Apple has neither confirmed nor denied the acquisition.