AoP-SAM: Automation of Prompts for Efficient Segmentation
This work addresses the need for automated segmentation in scenarios requiring rapid and resource-efficient processing, though it is incremental as it builds on SAM's existing capabilities.
The paper tackled the problem of manual prompt engineering being impractical for real-world applications of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) by proposing AoP-SAM, which automatically generates prompts in optimal locations, resulting in improved efficiency and accuracy on three datasets.
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) is a powerful foundation model for image segmentation, showing robust zero-shot generalization through prompt engineering. However, relying on manual prompts is impractical for real-world applications, particularly in scenarios where rapid prompt provision and resource efficiency are crucial. In this paper, we propose the Automation of Prompts for SAM (AoP-SAM), a novel approach that learns to generate essential prompts in optimal locations automatically. AoP-SAM enhances SAM's efficiency and usability by eliminating manual input, making it better suited for real-world tasks. Our approach employs a lightweight yet efficient Prompt Predictor model that detects key entities across images and identifies the optimal regions for placing prompt candidates. This method leverages SAM's image embeddings, preserving its zero-shot generalization capabilities without requiring fine-tuning. Additionally, we introduce a test-time instance-level Adaptive Sampling and Filtering mechanism that generates prompts in a coarse-to-fine manner. This notably enhances both prompt and mask generation efficiency by reducing computational overhead and minimizing redundant mask refinements. Evaluations of three datasets demonstrate that AoP-SAM substantially improves both prompt generation efficiency and mask generation accuracy, making SAM more effective for automated segmentation tasks.