What is Segment Anything Model (SAM)? A Breakdown.

Segment Anything Model (SAM), developed by Meta AI and released in April 2023, is an advanced instance segmentation model trained on 11 million images and 1.1 billion segmentation masks, designed to revolutionize image labeling in computer vision. SAM utilizes a transformer-based architecture to featurize images and generate segmentation masks, offering zero-shot prediction capabilities and the ability to process prompts such as points or text. Its training relies on the SA-1B Dataset, the largest mask corpus available, facilitating the model's use in various applications, including annotation assistance and background removal. SAM's architecture allows for seamless deployment, with a heavier backend GPU processing for image featurization and a lighter model running within web browsers. The model's release is seen as a pivotal moment in computer vision, akin to the impact of GPT in natural language processing, due to its potential to set new standards in object detection and its powerful zero-shot capabilities.