A Survey on Vision Mamba: Models, Applications and Challenges

Mamba, a recent selective structured state space model, performs excellently on long sequence modeling tasks. Mamba mitigates the modeling constraints of convolutional neural networks and offers advanced modeling capabilities similar to those of Transformers, through global receptive fields and dynamic weighting. Crucially, it achieves this without incurring the quadratic computational complexity typically associated with Transformers. Due to its advantages over the former two mainstream foundation models, Mamba exhibits great potential to be a visual foundation model. Researchers are actively applying Mamba to various computer vision tasks, leading to numerous emerging works. To help keep pace with the rapid advancements in computer vision, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of visual Mamba approaches. This paper begins by delineating the formulation of the original Mamba model. Subsequently, our review of visual Mamba delves into several representative backbone networks to elucidate the core insights of the visual Mamba. We then categorize related works using different modalities, including image, video, point cloud, multi-modal, and others. Specifically, for image applications, we further organize them into distinct tasks to facilitate a more structured discussion. Finally, we discuss the challenges and future research directions for visual Mamba, providing insights for future research in this quickly evolving area. A comprehensive list of visual Mamba models reviewed in this work is available at https://github.com/Ruixxxx/Awesome-Vision-Mamba-Models.