grounding-dino

grounding-dino is a skill for Claude Code from graph-robots/open-robot-skills. It costs 49 tokens per session (583 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A zero-shot image detector that finds named objects in an RGB camera image and returns labeled 2D bounding boxes with confidence scores. Zero-shot means it can search for text-described objects without training specifically on your images.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to locate objects such as a box or food package, choose the best detection, and pass its box to segmentation or grasping steps.
Why use it?
It provides a coarse location for an object before a separate tool creates a more precise pixel mask.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the open-robot-skills plugin — 39 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to locate objects such as a box or food package, choose the best detection, and pass its box to segmentation or grasping steps.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/graph-robots/open-robot-skills/grounding-dino
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add graph-robots/open-robot-skills --skill grounding-dino
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/graph-robots/open-robot-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install open-robot-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 39 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for grounding-dino

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/graph-robots/open-robot-skills/grounding-dino/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/graph-robots/open-robot-skills/grounding-dino)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/graph-robots/open-robot-skills/grounding-dino"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/graph-robots/open-robot-skills/grounding-dino/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for grounding-dino

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/graph-robots/open-robot-skills/grounding-dino"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/graph-robots/open-robot-skills/grounding-dino.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 49 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 583 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00049 $0.00583
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.00292
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00117
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00058

Measured 10d ago against content hash de0c5fe59200, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

grounding-dino scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 10d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (tools.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

tools/grounding-dino/SKILL.md · 57 lines

What it actually says

grounding-dino

The Grounding DINO servicer (IDEA-Research/grounding-dino-base via transformers) as one in-process tool. Image in: RGB uint8 [H, W, 3] numpy array; out: {detections: [{box, label, score}, ...]}.

When to use

  • Locating a named object in a camera frame: grounding-dino.detect(rgb, "cream cheese box."), pick the best box (highest score, or closest to a pointing-model pixel), then sam3.segment_box for a pixel-accurate mask.
  • Empty detections means nothing cleared the thresholds — treat as not-found, don't retry blindly with the same prompt.

Install

uv sync --extra grounding-dino   # torch + transformers
# (pip: pip install -e ".[grounding-dino]")

Weights download from HuggingFace on first call. Env knobs: GAP_DINO_DEVICE (default cuda; CPU works but is slow) and GAP_DINO_MODEL (default IDEA-Research/grounding-dino-base).

Gotchas (carried over from the servicer)

  • Period-separated phrases: GDINO's text encoder expects each object phrase terminated with . ("red cube. green cube."). A missing final period is appended automatically, but separate multiple objects yourself.
  • Default thresholds are deliberately low (0.20/0.20) for recall on household objects; raise them when false positives leak through. Zero or negative thresholds fall back to the defaults (proto-default semantics).
  • label strings are the matched text spans, not your full query — when querying multiple phrases, group detections by label.
  • The model is a lazy module-level singleton; the first call pays the weights-load latency, subsequent calls don't.
Files

What ships with it

4 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 10d ago First seen · 57 lines · 49 tokens per session scan A de0c5fe59200

Subscribe to this mod's changes

grounding-dino is a skill published in the GitHub repository graph-robots/open-robot-skills (41 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 49 tokens to every session and 583 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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