Meta: Segment Anything Model (SAM)

Released on November 19th, 2025, Segment Anything 3 (SAM 3) is a zero-shot image segmentation model that “detects, segments, and tracks objects in images and videos based on concept prompts.” This model was developed by Meta as the third model in the Segment Anything series.

Unlike its previous SAM models (Segment Anything and Segment Anything 2), you can provide SAM 3 with the prompt “shipping container” and it will generate precise segmentation masks for all shipping containers in an image. SAM 3 generates segmentation masks that correspond to the location of the objects found with a text prompt.

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.

SAM 3D Objects is a 3D reconstruction model released on November 19, 2025 by Meta AI as part of the broader SAM 3 release. It extends the Segment Anything Model family from 2D segmentation into 3D object reconstruction, predicting geometry, texture, and spatial layout for individual objects from a single RGB image. Given an image together with a prompt identifying the object (a segmentation mask, point, or bounding box), the model outputs a full textured 3D mesh, without requiring multi-view captures, depth sensors, or known camera parameters.SAM 3D Objects uses a two-stage transformer architecture: a coarse stage that predicts 3D shape and object pose, followed by a refinement stage that adds texture and surface detail, with DINOv2 used to encode the input image. The model is trained via a human-and-model-in-the-loop data engine that combines synthetic 3D assets with real-image annotations, producing approximately 3.14 million mesh annotations across nearly 1 million images. Meta released SAM 3D Objects alongside SAM 3D Body, a companion model for single-image human mesh recovery, and SAM 3D Artist Objects (SA-3DAO), a new evaluation benchmark assembled with artist-created 3D ground truth. The model is designed as a companion to SAM 3 for downstream applications including augmented reality, robotics, content creation, and visual effects; it already powers the View in Room feature on Facebook Marketplace. SAM 3D Objects is released under the SAM 3 license; users should review the license terms prior to commercial use.

Grounding DINO is an open-vocabulary object detection model developed by IDEA Research, released in March 2023 under the Apache 2.0 license. It extends the DINO transformer-based detector with grounded pre-training, enabling it to detect arbitrary objects described by free-form text queries rather than a fixed set of predefined categories. The model integrates a text encoder with a visual backbone through a feature fusion module that aligns language and visual representations at multiple scales.Grounding DINO achieves strong zero-shot detection performance on COCO, LVIS, and ODinW benchmarks, and supports referring expression comprehension tasks. It is widely used as a foundation for open-vocabulary detection pipelines and as the detection backbone in systems such as Grounded-SAM. The model is particularly suited for applications requiring flexible, text-driven object localization across diverse domains.