What is Fast Segment Anything (FastSAM)? The Ultimate Guide.

Fast Segment Anything (FastSAM) is an image segmentation model developed by the Image and Video Analysis Group at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, designed to offer faster inference speeds while using significantly fewer resources than Meta's original Segment Anything Model (SAM). Trained on just 2% of the dataset used for SAM, FastSAM leverages the YOLOv8 instance segmentation architecture and demonstrates the robustness of the original dataset by achieving relatively precise segmentation results despite its smaller scale. While FastSAM's segmentation masks are less accurate than those of SAM, it boasts a 50x faster run-time, making it a practical option for real-time applications. FastSAM also supports additional functionalities like zero-shot edge detection and text-prompted segmentation, though it is not intended to replace SAM entirely. Instead, FastSAM exemplifies how effective segmentation can be achieved with a smaller model and data subset, offering potential for use in transfer learning and domain-specific tasks.