On Efficient Variants of Segment Anything Model: A Survey

This project is a survey paper (arXiv:2410.04960) rather than a software tool or a novel model implementation. As a document, its primary value lies in the synthesis of existing research on SAM efficiency (e.g., MobileSAM, FastSAM, RepViT-SAM). From a competitive intelligence perspective, its defensibility is minimal (score 2) because it is a snapshot of a rapidly evolving field; new variants are published weekly, rendering static surveys obsolete quickly. The 'frontier risk' is high because Meta (the creator of SAM) and other labs like Google and Apple are actively releasing integrated efficient versions (e.g., SAM-2, which includes significant efficiency gains over the original). While the survey mentions 5 forks in its first 3 days, indicating immediate researcher interest, it lacks a technical 'moat' such as a benchmark suite or a unified API for the models it reviews. The displacement horizon is short (6 months) because the field is currently transitioning from original SAM variants to SAM-2 and beyond, which will likely require a new survey entirely.