Need Suggestions for Removing Backgrounds

[socrtwo]

I now have 3 installation of ImgSeekWeb going. Two have 300 images or
so and one has 2500 images. Two are working well and returning good
matches, one for fish images with more or less standard backgounds
from fishbase.org and the other are French and Chinese postage stamps
which also have standard backgrounds, either white or black, and quite
minimal.

The third unsuccessful installation is with 300 images of relatives
going back to images from the turn of the last century. I changed all
the more modern color images to black and white as well, but the
matches are just crazy. I've tried regularizing the clipping size of
the face and I made all the images the same width and same dpi.
However the backgrounds are highly variable.

So I need suggestions on how to make face matching better. Maybe
imgseek is not the best Open Source tool for face matching. I did
purchase a commercial background remover PhotoShop add-in for about
$50 but with at least 300 images to process this is not a trivial
task. Also I saw this service which is quite interesting, but too
expensive for this low budget demo project.http://www.deepetch.com/
credit_bundle.php

So does anybody have insight into batch processing background removal
or suggestions regarding a specific face matching Open Source project?

Thanks