  With the development of large language models, many remarkable linguistic
systems like ChatGPT have thrived and achieved astonishing success on many
tasks, showing the incredible power of foundation models. In the spirit of
unleashing the capability of foundation models on vision tasks, the Segment
Anything Model (SAM), a vision foundation model for image segmentation, has
been proposed recently and presents strong zero-shot ability on many downstream
2D tasks. However, whether SAM can be adapted to 3D vision tasks has yet to be
explored, especially 3D object detection. With this inspiration, we explore
adapting the zero-shot ability of SAM to 3D object detection in this paper. We
propose a SAM-powered BEV processing pipeline to detect objects and get
promising results on the large-scale Waymo open dataset. As an early attempt,
our method takes a step toward 3D object detection with vision foundation
models and presents the opportunity to unleash their power on 3D vision tasks.
The code is released at https://github.com/DYZhang09/SAM3D.
