# Zero-Shot and Supervised Bird Image Segmentation Using Foundation Models: A Dual-Pipeline Approach with Grounding DINO~1.5, YOLOv11, and SAM~2.1

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.00184 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00184/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 17 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Grounding DINO 1.5: Advance the "Edge" of Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.10300/) (2024)
- [BirdSoundsDenoising: Deep Visual Audio Denoising for Bird Sounds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10196/) (2022)
- [Vision Transformer Segmentation for Visual Bird Sound Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09167/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Bird image segmentation remains a challenging task in computer vision due to extreme pose diversity, complex plumage patterns, and variable lighting conditions. This paper presents a dual-pipeline framework for binary bird image segmentation leveraging 2025 foundation models. We introduce two operating modes built upon Segment Anything Model 2.1 (SAM 2.1) as a shared frozen backbone: (1) a zero-shot pipeline using Grounding DINO 1.5 to detect birds via the text prompt "bird" before prompting SAM 2.1 with bounding boxes requiring no labelled bird data; and (2) a supervised pipeline that fine-tunes YOLOv11 on the CUB-200-2011 dataset for high-precision detection, again prompting SAM 2.1 for pixel-level masks. The segmentation model is never retrained for new species or domains. On CUB-200-2011 (11,788 images, 200 species), the supervised pipeline achieves IoU 0.912, Dice 0.954, and F1 0.953 outperforming all prior baselines including SegFormer-B2 (IoU 0.842) by +7.0 percentage points. The zero-shot pipeline achieves IoU 0.831 using only a text prompt, the first such result reported on this benchmark. We demonstrate that prompt-based foundation model pipelines outperform task specific end-to-end trained segmentation networks, while requiring only lightweight detector fine-tuning (~1 hour) for domain adaptation. Complete PyTorch implementation, dataset preparation scripts, and trained weights are publicly available.