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Life sciences · Preprint
arXiv · October 29, 2026
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Dropwise condensation is key to power and water systems. State-of-the-art condensation surfaces are often inhomogeneous, either patterned by design or random defects. Inhomogeneous surface features dictate the rates of each stage of dropwise condensation-nucleation, growth, coalescence, and shedding. Characterizing these rates requires the precise detection of thousands of droplets. Yet, existing segmentation methods are unable to detect droplets on inhomogeneous surfaces. We developed TileSAM3, a universal droplet segmentation tool built on the Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3). Hierarchical tiling with per-tile inference followed by post-processing extended SAM3's detection cap and raised the effective resolution of small droplets. We created two datasets: High Quality Droplet Dataset (N=365,826; HQDD) with homogeneous surfaces and Low Quality Droplet Dataset (N=63,577; LQDD) with patterned, defect-laden surfaces under adverse lighting. TileSAM3 closely reproduced thresholding annotations on HQDD, surpassed it over sixfold on LQDD (Average Precision 0.57 versus 0.088), and outperformed other deep learning models on all metrics evaluated. Combined with KD-tree tracking, TileSAM3 identified localized nucleation and coalescence in narrow active bands on a stiffness-patterned surface. TileSAM3 enables analysis of understudied inhomogeneous substrates with poor lighting and videography which facilitates faster, lower cost research of condensation materials.