Facebook’s parent company Meta on Wednesday launched a new artificial intelligence model that can identify objects within images.
Called “segment anything”, it aims to accelerate research into segmentation and offer more general image and video understanding.
Segmentation refers to the ability to identify which pixels in an image belong to a specific object.
Meta said its initiative aims to “democratise” segmentation, which is used in various applications, from analysing scientific imagery to editing photos.
Usually, it requires highly specialised work by technical experts with access to AI-trained infrastructure and large volumes of data to create an accurate segmentation model for specific tasks.
Under the new project, Meta has released its general Segment Anything Model (SAM) and its Segment Anything 1-Billion mask dataset (SA-1B).
Both aim to enable a broad set of applications and foster further research into foundation models for computer vision.
SAM covers a broad set of uses and can be even used for underwater photos.
It can improve creative applications such as extracting image parts for collages or video editing. It could also be used to boost scientific studies of natural occurrences on earth or even in space.
“We believe the possibilities are broad and we are excited by the many potential use cases we haven’t even imagined yet,” Meta said.
The SA-1B dataset is available for research purposes and SAM is available under a permissive open-licence framework.
“Our goal was to build a foundation model for image segmentation … a promptable model that is trained on diverse data and that can adapt to specific tasks, analogous to how prompting is used in natural language processing models,” Meta said.
“However, the segmentation data needed to train such a model is not readily available online or elsewhere, unlike images, videos, and text.
"Thus, with Segment Anything, we set out to simultaneously develop a general, promptable segmentation model and use it to create a segmentation dataset of unprecedented scale."
Earlier, to solve any kind of segmentation problem, there were two classes of approaches: interactive segmentation that required a person to guide the method; and automatic segmentation that needed substantial amounts of manually annotated objects to train.
“Neither approach provided a general, fully automatic approach to segmentation,” Meta said.
The SA-1B dataset that Meta released on Wednesday is the largest to date, the company claimed.
It collected this data using SAM.
“Annotators used SAM to interactively annotate images, and then the newly annotated data was used to update SAM in turn," Meta said.
"We repeated this cycle many times to iteratively improve both the model and dataset."
The final dataset includes more than 1.1 billion segmentation masks collected on about 11 million licensed and privacy-preserving images.
Lewis Hamilton in 2018
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How to register as a donor
1) Organ donors can register on the Hayat app, run by the Ministry of Health and Prevention
2) There are about 11,000 patients in the country in need of organ transplants
3) People must be over 21. Emiratis and residents can register.
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UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
What sanctions would be reimposed?
Under ‘snapback’, measures imposed on Iran by the UN Security Council in six resolutions would be restored, including:
- An arms embargo
- A ban on uranium enrichment and reprocessing
- A ban on launches and other activities with ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons, as well as ballistic missile technology transfer and technical assistance
- A targeted global asset freeze and travel ban on Iranian individuals and entities
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MATCH INFO
Scotland 59 (Tries: Hastings (2), G Horne (3), Turner, Seymour, Barclay, Kinghorn, McInally; Cons: Hastings 8)
Russia 0
Living in...
This article is part of a guide on where to live in the UAE. Our reporters will profile some of the country’s most desirable districts, provide an estimate of rental prices and introduce you to some of the residents who call each area home.
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The Laughing Apple
Yusuf/Cat Stevens
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How much do leading UAE’s UK curriculum schools charge for Year 6?
- Nord Anglia International School (Dubai) – Dh85,032
- Kings School Al Barsha (Dubai) – Dh71,905
- Brighton College Abu Dhabi - Dh68,560
- Jumeirah English Speaking School (Dubai) – Dh59,728
- Gems Wellington International School – Dubai Branch – Dh58,488
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*Annual tuition fees covering the 2024/2025 academic year
ABU DHABI T10: DAY TWO
Bangla Tigers v Deccan Gladiators (3.30pm)
Delhi Bulls v Karnataka Tuskers (5.45pm)
Northern Warriors v Qalandars (8.00pm)
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MATCH DETAILS
Chelsea 4
Jorginho (4 pen, 71 pen), Azpilicueta (63), James (74)
Ajax 4
Abraham (2 og), Promes (20). Kepa (35 og), van de Beek (55)
