Semantic-Fast-SAM: Efficient Semantic Segmenter

TL;DR

Semantic-Fast-SAM (SFS) is a real-time, efficient semantic segmentation framework combining FastSAM with semantic labeling, achieving high accuracy and speed suitable for robotics applications.

Contribution

It introduces a fast, CNN-based semantic segmentation method that maintains accuracy while significantly reducing computational cost and enabling open-vocabulary segmentation.

Findings

SFS matches prior SAM-based methods' accuracy (mIoU ~70.33 on Cityscapes).

SFS achieves approximately 20x faster inference than SSA.

SFS outperforms recent open-vocabulary models on broad class labeling.

Abstract

We propose Semantic-Fast-SAM (SFS), a semantic segmentation framework that combines the Fast Segment Anything model with a semantic labeling pipeline to achieve real-time performance without sacrificing accuracy. FastSAM is an efficient CNN-based re-implementation of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) that runs much faster than the original transformer-based SAM. Building upon FastSAM's rapid mask generation, we integrate a Semantic-Segment-Anything (SSA) labeling strategy to assign meaningful categories to each mask. The resulting SFS model produces high-quality semantic segmentation maps at a fraction of the computational cost and memory footprint of the original SAM-based approach. Experiments on Cityscapes and ADE20K benchmarks demonstrate that SFS matches the accuracy of prior SAM-based methods (mIoU ~ 70.33 on Cityscapes and 48.01 on ADE20K) while achieving approximately 20x faster inference than SSA in the closed-set setting. We also show that SFS effectively handles open-vocabulary segmentation by leveraging CLIP-based semantic heads, outperforming recent open-vocabulary models on broad class labeling. This work enables practical real-time semantic segmentation with the "segment-anything" capability, broadening the applicability of foundation segmentation models in robotics scenarios. The implementation is available at https://github.com/KBH00/Semantic-Fast-SAM.