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Does YOLO26 Truly Offer Advantages Over Its Predecessors for Edge Deployment? A Benchmark Study in Aquaculture

Authors: Rakesh Ranjan, Gajanan S. Kothawade, Kata Sharrer, Scott Tsukuda, Christopher Good

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Abstract

The recently introduced YOLO26 architecture incorporates NMS-free end-to-end inference and is optimized for deployment on resource-constrained CPU-based devices, making it well-suited for edge-based aquaculture applications. However, its performance, operational efficiency, and deployment suitability have not been systematically validated in aquaculture-specific scenarios. This study presents a comprehensive benchmark of YOLO26 against three Ultralytics predecessors (YOLOv5u, YOLOv8, and YOLO11) across nano, small, and medium model scales for fish mortality detection, a critical indicator of fish population health and welfare. Twelve model variants were evaluated for detection accuracy, training efficiency across seven dataset sizes, and inference performance on high-performance NVIDIA A100 GPUs and a CPU-only Raspberry Pi 5 edge platform. All models achieved comparable performance on the full dataset, with mAP50 differing by only 1.04 percentage points, indicating that architectural generation has little influence on final detection accuracy when sufficient training data are available. However, clear trade-offs emerged in data efficiency and deployment performance. YOLOv8 achieved 90% mAP50 with only 400 training images, whereas the YOLO26 nano and small variants required 1,000 images to reach comparable accuracy. Conversely, YOLO26n achieved the highest inference speed on the Raspberry Pi 5 (7.51 FPS), while YOLOv5mu outperformed all contemporary medium-scale architectures on CPU-based hardware. These results show that architectural novelty alone is insufficient for model selection and that training data availability, target hardware, and inference requirements should be considered jointly when selecting object detection models for practical edge AI deployment in aquaculture.

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This paper presents a rigorous empirical evaluation of Ultralytics YOLO26 against the YOLOv8 baseline, offering an independent real-world stress test of NMS-free architectures on non-COCO distributions. Engineered for edge deployment, YOLO26 introduces native end-to-end one-to-one label assignment, the removal of Distribution Focal Loss (DFL), and a spectral-constrained CSP-Muon backbone. We conducted a comprehensive, cross-scale comparative analysis across five model capacities, using the general object detection (Pascal VOC) and dense aerial small-object detection (VisDrone) datasets. Models are evaluated across accuracy (mAP_50 and mAP_50:95), model complexity, and hardware-specific CPU/GPU latency. Our findings revealed that while YOLO26 achieves a lower computational footprint and superior accuracy on Pascal VOC, with YOLO26-x reaching 0.635 mAP_50:95, this advantage narrows in dense aerial environments. On VisDrone, where over 75% of objects are under 2,000 pixels, both architectures struggle significantly, yielding a minimal performance gap (0.214 mAP_50:95 for YOLOv8-x vs. 0.224 mAP_50:95 for YOLO26-x). Crucially, hardware benchmarking demonstrates that YOLOv8 maintains a consistent edge in GPU inference latency across identical scales (e.g., 6.92 ms for YOLOv8-s vs. 8.38 ms for YOLO26-s), showing that NMS-free design does not inherently guarantee superiority in universal deployment. This work maps the operational boundaries of NMS-free frameworks to guide architecture selection based on dataset density, object scale, and hardware constraints.
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