Efficient Object Detection

Ask about this topic

Overview

Efficient object detection studies how to find and locate objects accurately while using limited computation, memory, time, and energy, especially on mobile and edge devices. Common approaches include compact YOLO and real-time DETR models, streamlined feature pyramids, pruning, quantization and teacher-to-student distillation, as well as sparse or adaptive processing that focuses computation on likely objects or informative frames. Work is tested on benchmarks such as COCO for general detection and VisDrone for aerial small objects, alongside measurements on hardware such as phones, embedded boards and FPGAs. The central challenge is balancing accuracy—particularly for tiny or difficult objects—with speed and energy use, while ensuring benchmark gains translate to reliable performance on real devices and varied scenes.

Latest papers

CardsList

95 papers9 papers in the last four weeks, down 31% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. YOLO26-RD: An End-to-End Road Damage Detection Network With Learnable Contrast Enhancement and Edge-Guided Downsampling

    Aug 16, 2026Sompote Youwai, Pawarotorn Chaipetch, Hathairat Samaikul +1Object DetectionReal-Time Object Detection

    AI Research Group, Department of Civil Engineering, King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi, Bangkok, Thailand · Infraplus Co., Ltd., Thailand

  2. SPEANet: Structural Prior Enhanced Attention Network for Parameter-Efficient Remote Sensing Object Detection

    Aug 15, 2026Wei Lu, Junjie Li, Feifei Sang +1Efficient Object DetectionAerial Object Detection

    MOE Key Lab of ICSP, IMIS Lab of Anhui, Anhui Provincial Key Lab of Multimodal Cognitive Computation, Zenmorn-AHU · AI Joint Lab, School of Computer Science and Technology, Anhui University, Hefei 230601, China

  3. SkySeaLand: A Wide-Format Satellite Transportation Benchmark with an Ultra-Lightweight Detection Baseline

    Aug 7, 2026Md. Zahid Hasan Riad, Md Sultanul Islam OviRemote Sensing Small Object DetectionSmall Object Detection

    Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Green University of Bangladesh, Bangladesh · Dept. of Computer Science, George Mason University, Virginia, USA

  4. CFGPNet: Cross-Attention-Based Fused Gradient Programmed Network Framework for Multispectral Object Detection

    Aug 6, 2026Nima Hatami, Karim Faez, Saeed Sharifian +1Multispectral Object DetectionEfficient Object Detection

    Department of Electrical Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology, 15914, Tehran, Iran

  5. YOLOv14: Adaptive Real-Time Object Detection for Diverse Imaging Conditions

    Aug 5, 2026Jinling Jia, Jian Lu, Jone Yawl +1Domain AdaptationEfficient Object Detection

    Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications

  6. RadYOLO: Computationally Efficient 3D Object Detection and Segmentation in CT and MRI

    Aug 1, 2026Kai Geissler, Laurens Müller-Groh, Hans Meine3D Object Detection3D Medical Imaging

    Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS, Max-von-Laue-Str. 2, 28359 Bremen, Germany

  7. MambaPSA: A Mamba-based Replacement for C2PSA in YOLO26

    Jul 14, 2026Sheng-Wei Chan, Chia-Min Lin, Hsin-Jui Pan +4Efficient Neural Network InferenceEfficient Object Detection

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Tamkang University, New Taipei City, Taiwan

  8. MicroCharNet: Less is More for License Plate Character Detection

    Jul 13, 2026Huy Che, Dinh-Duy Phan, Duc-Lung VuEdge InferenceEfficient Object Detection

    University of Information Technology, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam · 2Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

  9. FRFDet: Efficient UAV Small Object Detection with Symmetric Sampling and Scalable Fusion

    Jul 5, 2026Yunzhong Si, Huiying Xu, Xinzhong Zhu +4Remote Sensing Small Object DetectionSmall Object Detection

    College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua, China · Hangzhou School of Automation, Zhejiang Normal University, Hangzhou, China · Beijing Geekplus Technology Co., Ltd, Beijing, China

  10. Real-Time Source-Free Object Detection

    Jun 30, 2026Sairam VCR, Varun Gopal, Poornima Jain +2Source-Free Domain AdaptationSelf-Training

    1IIT Hyderabad, India · 2Microsoft Research · 3MBZUAI

  11. Efficient RGB-T Object Detection via Sparse Cross-Modality Fusion

    Jun 29, 2026Chao Tian, Zikun Zhou, Chao Yang +2Multispectral Object DetectionEfficient Object Detection

    Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China

  12. From Spatial to Spectral: An Efficient, Frequency-Guided Feature Representation Learner for Small Object Detection

    Jun 22, 2026Yuhan Rui, Shihan Qiao, Yibin Lou +7Frequency-Domain Feature LearningSmall Object Detection

    Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China · University of Pennsylvania

  13. Ultralytics YOLO26: Unified Real-Time End-to-End Vision Models

    Jun 2, 2026Glenn Jocher, Jing Qiu, Mengyu Liu +3Open-Vocabulary Object DetectionInstance Segmentation

    Ultralytics

  14. Tiny Collaborative Inference for Occlusion-Robust Object Detection

    Jun 1, 2026Chieh-Tung Cheng, Mustafa Aslanov, Eiman KanjoEdge InferenceEfficient Object Detection

    Imperial College London, United Kingdom · Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom

  15. Lightweight SAR Ship Detection via Contrastive Distillation

    May 27, 2026Surendar Devasundaram, Banafsheh Saber Latibari, Abhijit MahalanobisEfficient Object DetectionRelational Knowledge Distillation

    University of Arizona · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering · Tucson, Arizona, USA

  16. TinyFormer: Preserving Tiny Objects in YOLO-DETR Hybrid Real-time Detectors

    May 24, 2026Jun-Wei Hsieh, Meng-Yu Kao, Ghufron Wahyu Kurniawan +1Hybrid CNN-Transformer ArchitecturesSmall Object Detection

    College of Artificial Intelligence, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan · 2Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories

  17. MR2-ByteTrack: CNN and Transformer-based Video Object Detection for AI-augmented Embedded Vision Sensor Nodes

    May 14, 2026Luca Bompani, Manuele Rusci, Luca Benini +2Edge InferenceEfficient Object Detection

    Electrical, Electronic and Information Engineering (DEI), University of Bologna, Italy. · Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT), KU Leuven, Belgium. · Integrated Systems Laboratory (IIS), ETH Zürich, Switzerland. +1

  18. Pattern-Enhanced RT-DETR for Multi-Class Battery Detection

    May 13, 2026Xu Zhong, Enyuan HuEfficient Object DetectionDetection Transformer

    Independent Researcher · Chemistry Division Brookhaven National Laboratory NY, USA

  19. AnyDepth-DETR/-YOLO: Any-depth object detection with a single network

    May 10, 2026Woochul Kang, Hyungseop Lee, Jiho LeeEfficient Neural Network InferenceDynamic Neural Networks

    Incheon Nat’l Univ.

  20. XiYOLO: Energy-Aware Object Detection via Iterative Architecture Search and Scaling

    May 7, 2026Tony Tran, Richie R. Suganda, Bin HuEnergy-Efficient MLEdge Inference

    Department of Research Computing University of Houston Houston, TX 77479 · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Houston Houston, TX 77479 · Department of Engineering Technology University of Houston Houston, TX 77479

  21. Learning Where to Embed: Noise-Aware Positional Embedding for Query Retrieval in Small-Object Detection

    Apr 16, 2026Yangchen Zeng, Zhenyu Yu, Dongming Jiang +5Small Object DetectionEfficient Object Detection

    Southeast University · Fudan University · The University of Texas at Dallas +6

  22. DroneScan-YOLO: Redundancy-Aware Lightweight Detection for Tiny Objects in UAV Imagery

    Apr 14, 2026Yann V. BellecSmall Object DetectionAerial Object Detection

  23. RAVEN: Radar Adaptive Vision Encoders for Efficient Chirp-wise Object Detection and Segmentation

    Apr 6, 2026Anuvab Sen, Mir Sayeed Mohammad, Saibal MukhopadhyaymmWave Radar SensingEfficient Object Detection

    Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

  24. ComPrivDet: Efficient Privacy Object Detection in Compressed Domains Through Inference Reuse

    Apr 4, 2026Yunhao Yao, Zhiqiang Wang, Ruiqi Li +3Object DetectionVideo Object Detection

    University of Science and Technology of China (USTC)

  25. SFFNet: Synergistic Feature Fusion Network With Dual-Domain Edge Enhancement for UAV Image Object Detection

    Apr 3, 2026Wenfeng Zhang, Jun Ni, Yue Meng +4Object DetectionAerial Object Detection

    College of Computer and Information Science, Chongqing Normal University, Chongqing 401333, China · CETC Yizhihang (Chongqing) Technology Co., Ltd, Chongqing 400031, China · School of Computer Engineering, Weifang University, Weifang 261061, China +1

  26. DeCo-DETR: Decoupled Cognition DETR for efficient Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

    Apr 3, 2026Siheng Wang, Yanshu Li, Bohan Hu +12Open-Vocabulary Object DetectionDetection Transformer

    Jiangsu University · MBZUAI · Brown University +5

  27. BlankSkip: Early-exit Object Detection onboard Nano-drones

    Mar 30, 2026Carlo Marra, Beatrice Alessandra Motetti, Alessio Burrello +3Efficient Object DetectionObject Detection

    †Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy

  28. Learnable Instance Attention Filtering for Adaptive Detector Distillation

    Mar 27, 2026Chen Liu, Qizhen Lan, Zhicheng Ding +2Knowledge DistillationFeature-Based Knowledge Distillation

    Dept. of CS, University of Alabama at Birmingham · Dept. of CS, Bowling Green State University

  29. SDD-YOLO: A Small-Target Detection Framework for Ground-to-Air Anti-UAV Surveillance with Edge-Efficient Deployment

    Mar 26, 2026Pengyu Chen, Haotian Sa, Yiwei Hu +2Small Object DetectionAerial Object Detection

    Chien-Shiung Wu College, Southeast University, Nanjing, China · School of Information Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China

  30. TorR: Towards Brain-Inspired Task-Oriented Reasoning via Cache-Oriented Algorithm-Architecture Co-design

    Mar 24, 2026Hyunwoo Oh, SungHeon Jeong, Suyeon Jang +4Efficient Object DetectionHardware-Software Co-Design

    Department of Computer Science, University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA, USA