# Segment Anything for Video: A Comprehensive Review of Video Object Segmentation and Tracking from Past to Future

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22792 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22792/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 93 of its 130 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 93)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.12033/) (2019)
- [CoTracker: It is Better to Track Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07635/) (2023)
- [Medical SAM Adapter: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12620/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Video Instance Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14503/) (2020)
- [XMem: Long-Term Video Object Segmentation with an Atkinson-Shiffrin Memory Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07115/) (2022)
- [Video Object Segmentation using Space-Time Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00607/) (2019)
- [Segment Anything in High Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01567/) (2023)
- [Hiera: A Hierarchical Vision Transformer without the Bells-and-Whistles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00989/) (2023)
- [TAPIR: Tracking Any Point with per-frame Initialization and temporal Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08637/) (2023)
- [PointOdyssey: A Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset for Long-Term Point Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15055/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning for Segmentation using an Open Large-Scale Dataset in 2D Echocardiography](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06948/) (2019)
- [MOSE: A New Dataset for Video Object Segmentation in Complex Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01872/) (2023)
- [YouTube-VOS: Sequence-to-Sequence Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00461/) (2018)
- [Segment Anything in Medical Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12306/) (2023)
- [Associating Objects with Transformers for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02638/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Space-Time Networks with Improved Memory Coverage for Efficient Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05210/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [TSMS-SAM2: Multi-scale Temporal Sampling Augmentation and Memory-Splitting Pruning for Promptable Video Object Segmentation and Tracking in Surgical Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05829/) (2025)
- [PanoSAM2: Lightweight Distortion- and Memory-aware Adaptions of SAM2 for 360 Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07901/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Video Object Segmentation and Tracking (VOST) presents a complex yet critical challenge in computer vision, requiring robust integration of segmentation and tracking across temporally dynamic frames. Traditional methods have struggled with domain generalization, temporal consistency, and computational efficiency. The emergence of foundation models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and its successor, SAM2, has introduced a paradigm shift, enabling prompt-driven segmentation with strong generalization capabilities. Building upon these advances, this survey provides a comprehensive review of SAM/SAM2-based methods for VOST, structured along three temporal dimensions: past, present, and future. We examine strategies for retaining and updating historical information (past), approaches for extracting and optimizing discriminative features from the current frame (present), and motion prediction and trajectory estimation mechanisms for anticipating object dynamics in subsequent frames (future). In doing so, we highlight the evolution from early memory-based architectures to the streaming memory and real-time segmentation capabilities of SAM2. We also discuss recent innovations such as motion-aware memory selection and trajectory-guided prompting, which aim to enhance both accuracy and efficiency. Finally, we identify remaining challenges including memory redundancy, error accumulation, and prompt inefficiency, and suggest promising directions for future research. This survey offers a timely and structured overview of the field, aiming to guide researchers and practitioners in advancing the state of VOST through the lens of foundation models.