Grounded SAM vs SAM-CLIP

Grounded SAM is an open-vocabulary image segmentation model developed by IDEA Research, released in January 2024 under the Apache 2.0 license. It combines Grounding DINO, a zero-shot open-vocabulary object detector, with the Segment Anything Model to produce precise segmentation masks for objects identified through free-form text prompts. The two models are used sequentially: Grounding DINO localizes objects from a text query, and SAM generates the corresponding segmentation masks.

Grounded SAM enables zero-shot instance segmentation without task-specific training data, making it applicable to domains where labeled segmentation data is scarce. It supports arbitrary text queries and can segment objects not represented in standard training sets. The model is commonly used in automated labeling pipelines, robotic perception, and domain-specific vision applications requiring open-vocabulary segmentation.

SAM-CLIP is a unified vision foundation model introduced by researchers at Apple and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in October 2023. It merges two popular vision foundation models — Meta's Segment Anything Model (SAM) and OpenAI's CLIP — into a single shared Vision Transformer backbone through a combination of multi-task learning, continual learning, and teacher-student distillation. The method requires only a small fraction of the original pretraining datasets and demonstrates that complementary capabilities from distinct foundation models can be consolidated without retraining from scratch, reducing the storage and compute cost of running both models in inference.

The resulting model retains SAM's zero-shot segmentation ability and CLIP's zero-shot classification and image-text retrieval, while introducing new capabilities the individual models lacked. SAM-CLIP establishes state-of-the-art results on zero-shot semantic segmentation across five benchmarks, improving mean IoU by 6.8 points on Pascal VOC and 5.9 points on COCO-Stuff over prior specialized models. The paper was accepted at the UniReps Workshop at NeurIPS 2023 and the eLVM Workshop at CVPR 2024. Apple has published the research but has not released model weights or inference code publicly.