LiteSAM is Actually what you Need for segment Everything

The Segment Anything model (SAM) has brought significant changes to the segmentation field with its superior performance, but its extensive computational resource requirements remain a limiting factor. Many works, such as MobileSAM, Edge-SAM, and MobileSAM-v2, have explored lightweight solutions. However, their use of traditional Grid Search sampling strategies or two-stage concatenation methods, which do not allow for end-to-end training, severely limit the performance of segment everything (SegEvery). This paper introduces Lite-SAM, an efficient end-to-end solution for the SegEvery task designed to reduce computational costs and redundancy. Lite-SAM is composed of four main components: a streamlined CNN-Transformer hybrid encoder (LiteViT), an automated prompt proposal network (AutoPPN), a traditional prompt encoder, and a mask decoder. All these components are integrated within the SAM framework. Our LiteViT, a high-performance lightweight backbone network, has only 1.16M parameters, which is a 23% reduction compared to the lightest existing backbone network Shufflenet. We also introduce AutoPPN, an innovative end-to-end method for prompt word generation. This is an improvement over traditional grid search sampling methods, and its unique design allows for easy integration into any SAM series algorithm, extending its usability. we have thoroughly benchmarked Lite-SAM across a plethora of both public and private datasets. The evaluation encompassed a broad spectrum of universal metrics, including the number of parameters, SegEvery execution time, and accuracy. The findings reveal that Lite-SAM, operating with a lean 4.2M parameters, significantly outpaces its counterparts, demonstrating performance improvements of 43x, 31x, 20x, 21x, and 1.6x over SAM, MobileSAM, Edge-SAM, EfficientViT-SAM, and MobileSAM-v2 respectively, all the while maintaining competitive accuracy. This underscores Lite-SAM's prowess in achieving an optimal equilibrium between performance and precision, thereby setting a new state-of-the-art(SOTA) benchmark in the domain.