SegSEM: Enabling and Enhancing SAM2 for SEM Contour Extraction

Abstract

Extracting high-fidelity 2D contours from Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) images is critical for calibrating Optical Proximity Correction (OPC) models. While foundation models like Segment Anything 2 (SAM2) are promising, adapting them to specialized domains with scarce annotated data is a major challenge. This paper presents a case study on adapting SAM2 for SEM contour extraction in a few-shot setting. We propose SegSEM, a framework built on two principles: a data-efficient fine-tuning strategy that adapts by selectively training only the model’s encoders, and a robust hybrid architecture integrating a traditional algorithm as a confidence-aware fallback. Using a small dataset of 60 production images, our experiments demonstrate this methodology’s viability. The primary contribution is a methodology for leveraging foundation models in data-constrained industrial applications.

Publication
In IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS)
Guangyu (Gary) Hu
Guangyu (Gary) Hu
Researcher at Huawei Hong Kong Research Center, Fermat Lab

My research interests include LLM + formal verification reasoning and hardware formal verification.

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