Segment Anything
Segment Anything (SAM)
Click anything, cut out anything — segmentation, solved
Latest: SAM ViT-H (Apr 2023); line continued by SAM 2 (2024) and SAM 3 (2025)
The first promptable segmentation foundation model: click a point or draw a box and SAM returns a pixel-accurate mask for any object, zero-shot, in any image. Released April 2023 — model and code under Apache 2.0, alongside the research-licensed SA-1B, then the largest segmentation dataset ever built, it reset computer vision overnight.
Why it matters
SAM turned segmentation into a commodity: one promptable model that cuts out any object in any image zero-shot, released Apache-2.0 with SA-1B's 1.1 billion masks and a browser demo on day one. It became one of the most-cited vision papers of the 2020s, spawned a family of successors, and powers Instagram's editing tools.
Facts
- One clickable model made 'cut out any object in any photo' a solved commodity, and it shipped with a browser demo on day one.
- SA-1B holds 1.1 billion masks across 11 million licensed images — roughly 400x more masks than any prior dataset.
- SAM powers Instagram's Backdrop and Cutouts editing features, and became one of the most-cited vision papers of the 2020s.
- 12 authors (Kirillov et al.), submitted April 5, 2023.
Try it yourself
sam-vit-huge on Hugging Face ↗ Run the official notebook in Colab ↗ Segment Anything Playground (now running SAM 3) ↗
Lineage
Sources
arXiv ↗GitHub · segment-anything ↗Meta AI research ↗Meta AI ↗