Improve Virtual Background Segmentation Quality in Calls

Customers have reported noticeably lower virtual background quality in CometChat Calls compared to other WebRTC-based clients such as Google Meet, under identical testing conditions.

The reported issues include:

• Soft or blurry edges around hair, shoulders, and the head outline.

• Background bleeding through the user's head and body outline.

• Visible flickering as the segmentation mask shifts between frames.

• The quality gap becomes more noticeable with detailed or textured backgrounds, but is also visible with plain backgrounds.

• The issue was reproduced on the customer's integration as well as on the CometChat hosted demo at calls.cometchat.io, indicating that it does not appear to be specific to the customer's implementation.
  

Expected:
Virtual background segmentation should provide clean, stable edges around the user, with minimal background bleeding and frame-to-frame mask flickering, providing a video quality comparable to commonly used WebRTC calling platforms.

Customer Impact:
The customer uses CometChat for client-facing interview calls. The video quality has been raised by participants and senior internal stakeholders and is affecting their confidence in using CometChat video calling in client-facing scenarios.

Environment:

• Calls SDK: @cometchat/calls-sdk-javascript v5.0.2

• Reproduced on: Customer integration and calls.cometchat.io

• Comparison: Google Meet under the same person, room, lighting, webcam, and virtual background conditions.