{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/quantifying-the-limits-of-segment-anything","title":"Quantifying the Limits of Segmentation Foundation Models: Modeling Challenges in Segmenting Tree-Like and Low-Contrast Objects","arxiv_id":"2412.04243","date":"2024-12-05","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yixin Zhang","Nicholas Konz","Kevin Kramer","Maciej A. Mazurowski"],"abstract":"Image segmentation foundation models (SFMs) like Segment Anything Model (SAM) have achieved impressive zero-shot and interactive segmentation across diverse domains. However, they struggle to segment objects with certain structures, particularly those with dense, tree-like morphology and low textural contrast from their surroundings. These failure modes are crucial for understanding the limitations of SFMs in real-world applications. To systematically study this issue, we introduce interpretable metrics quantifying object tree-likeness and textural separability. On carefully controlled synthetic experiments and real-world datasets, we show that SFM performance (e.g., SAM, SAM 2, HQ-SAM) noticeably correlates with these factors. We link these failures to \"textural confusion\", where models misinterpret local structure as global texture, causing over-segmentation or difficulty distinguishing objects from similar backgrounds. Notably, targeted fine-tuning fails to resolve this issue, indicating a fundamental limitation. Our study provides the first quantitative framework for modeling the behavior of SFMs on challenging structures, offering interpretable insights into their segmentation capabilities.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.04243v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.04243v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"quantifying-the-limits-of-segment-anything","repo_url":"https://github.com/mazurowski-lab/sam-texturalconfusion-metrics","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"image-segmentation","task_name":"Image Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"interactive-segmentation","task_name":"Interactive Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"segmentation","task_name":"Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"semantic-segmentation","task_name":"Semantic Segmentation"},{"task_slug":"zero-shot-segmentation","task_name":"Zero Shot Segmentation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"sam","method_name":"SAM"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2412.04243","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}