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29th July 2024 - Link Blog

SAM 2: The next generation of Meta Segment Anything Model for videos and images (via) Segment Anything is Meta AI's model for image segmentation: for any image or frame of video it can identify which shapes on the image represent different "objects" - things like vehicles, people, animals, tools and more.

SAM 2 "outperforms SAM on its 23 dataset zero-shot benchmark suite, while being six times faster". Notably, SAM 2 works with video where the original SAM only worked with still images. It's released under the Apache 2 license.

The best way to understand SAM 2 is to try it out. Meta have a web demo which worked for me in Chrome but not in Firefox. I uploaded a recent video of my brand new cactus tweezers (for removing detritus from my cacti without getting spiked) and selected the succulent and the tweezers as two different objects:

A video editing interface focused on object tracking. The main part of the screen displays a close-up photograph of a blue-gray succulent plant growing among dry leaves and forest floor debris. The plant is outlined in blue, indicating it has been selected as "Object 1" for tracking. On the left side of the interface, there are controls for selecting and editing objects. Two objects are listed: Object 1 (the succulent plant) and Object 2 (likely the yellow stem visible in the image). At the bottom of the screen is a video timeline showing thumbnail frames, with blue and yellow lines representing the tracked paths of Objects 1 and 2 respectively. The interface includes options to add or remove areas from the selected object, start over, and "Track objects" to follow the selected items throughout the video.

Then I applied a "desaturate" filter to the background and exported this resulting video, with the background converted to black and white while the succulent and tweezers remained in full colour:

Also released today: the full SAM 2 paper, the SA-V dataset of "51K diverse videos and 643K spatio-temporal segmentation masks" and a Dataset explorer tool (again, not supported by Firefox) for poking around in that collection.

Posted 29th July 2024 at 11:59 pm

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This is a link post by Simon Willison, posted on 29th July 2024.

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