Real-Time Object Detection

Real-time vision demands models that are accurate, efficient, and simple to deploy across diverse hardware. The YOLO family has become widely deployed for this reason, yet most YOLO detectors still rely on non-maximum suppression at inference, carry heavy detection heads due to Distribution Focal Loss, require long training schedules, and can leave the smallest objects without positive label assignments. We present Ultralytics YOLO26, a unified real-time vision model family that addresses these limitations through coordinated architecture and training advances. YOLO26 uses a dual-head design for native NMS-free end-to-end inference and removes DFL entirely, yielding a lighter head with unconstrained regression range. Its training pipeline combines MuSGD, a hybrid Muon-SGD optimizer adapted from large language model training; Progressive Loss, which shifts supervision toward the inference-time head; and STAL, a label assignment strategy that guarantees positive coverage for small objects. Beyond detection, YOLO26 introduces task-specific head and loss designs for instance segmentation, pose estimation, and oriented detection, producing consistent gains across tasks and scales. The family spans five scales (n/s/m/l/x) and supports detection, instance segmentation, pose estimation, classification, and oriented detection in a single pipeline, with an open-vocabulary extension, YOLOE-26, for text-, visual-, and prompt-free inference. Across all scales, YOLO26 achieves 40.9-57.5 mAP on COCO at 1.7-11.8 ms T4 TensorRT latency, advancing the accuracy-latency Pareto front over prior real-time detectors, while YOLOE-26x reaches 40.6 AP on LVIS minival under text prompting. Code and models are available at https://github.com/ultralytics/ultralytics.

Real-time 3D object detection is a critical component for the safe operation of autonomous driving systems and robotics. While LiDAR point clouds provide accurate spatial information, processing them efficiently remains a significant challenge. Traditional methods rely on complex 3D convolutions or anchor-based paradigms that struggle to balance detection accuracy with inference speed. In this paper, we propose PillarDETR, a novel end-to-end 3D object detection architecture that combines the efficiency of pillar-based LiDAR encoding with the representational power of modern 2D vision models. Specifically, PillarDETR replaces standard convolutional backbones with a Cross Stage Partial (CSP) network derived from YOLOv8, enabling richer feature extraction from pseudoimages. Furthermore, we discard conventional anchor-based or center-based detection heads in favor of a Real-Time Detection Transformer (RT-DETR) decoder. This hybrid design allows the network to capture global context and directly predict 3D bounding boxes without relying on non-maximum suppression (NMS). Extensive experiments on the KITTI and nuScenes benchmarks demonstrate that PillarDETR achieves a compelling trade-off between mean Average Precision (mAP) and inference latency. Our ablation studies confirm that integrating the YOLOv8 backbone and RT-DETR head yields substantial improvements over the PointPillars baseline, establishing PillarDETR as a highly effective solution for real-time 3D perception.

This study aims to enhance maritime security by using advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computer Vision (CV) techniques. For this purpose, it was designed and assessed intelligent object detection systems that can detect the presence of ships on the sea surface under different real-time environments. To achieve this goal, a maritime image dataset with 6,468 images was used, covering different weather conditions like cloudy, foggy, rainy, and sunny environments. Six deep learning architectures were evaluated, including a base Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model, four transfer learning models (Xception, VGG16, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNetV2L), and a Vision Transformer (ViT) model. The models were compared using multiple performance indicators, including accuracy, Type I and Type II errors, model size, and video processing time. The results show that model performance varies depending on computational constraints and deployment conditions. While lightweight architectures are suitable for resource-limited devices, the ViT achieved the best overall performance, reaching 100% accuracy with the lowest error rates and the fastest video processing time. The findings highlight the potential of AI-driven computer vision systems for maritime surveillance, border protection, and autonomous navigation.

Deep learning-based object detection has revolutionized Precision Livestock Farming (PLF), yet a critical barrier remains: high-performance Foundation Models (such as SAM 3) are too computationally intensive for edge deployment, while lightweight models (like YOLO) require prohibitive manual annotation efforts. This work proposes a fully automated knowledge distillation pipeline that leverages the Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3) to generate zero-shot pseudo-labels for training efficient YOLOv8 detectors. By treating SAM 3 as an offline auto-annotator, we eliminate the manual labeling bottleneck, producing models capable of real-time inference on resource-constrained hardware. We systematically evaluate this approach on the PigLife dataset, comparing SAM 3-supervised models against human-annotated baselines. Results demonstrate that a SAM 3-trained YOLOv8m achieves a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 79.4% without human intervention, while reducing inference latency by approximately 200$\times$ compared to the teacher model. Furthermore, stratified analysis reveals that in low-occlusion scenarios, the automated pipeline achieves detection rates comparable to human benchmarks ($AP_{50} > 99\%$). These findings indicate that foundation models can serve as effective, zero-annotation-cost supervisors, enabling scalable edge computing solutions for smart agriculture.

YOLO-series and DETR-based detectors struggle with tiny-object detection. YOLO-style models benefit from efficient dense prediction, but their large-stride backbones may suppress tiny instances in deep feature maps and make grid assignment ambiguous. DETR-based models remove hand-crafted post-processing through set prediction, yet they reason over coarse token grids, where tiny objects occupy only a few weak tokens and are easily overlooked during matching. To address these limitations, we propose TinyFormer, a unified YOLO--DETR hybrid real-time detector that combines ViT representations, NMS-free set prediction, and a YOLO-style pyramid neck for accurate small-object detection. TinyFormer introduces a Parallel Bi-fusion Module (PBM), which builds high-resolution shortcuts from shallow stages to the feature pyramid, preserving fine spatial details during multi-scale fusion. We further design a Spatial Semantic Adapter (SSA) to compensate for the spatial loss caused by coarse tokenization. SSA extracts high-resolution cues from early stages and injects them into transformer token embeddings, improving tiny-object localization without sacrificing the global modeling ability of DETR. Experiments on MS COCO show that TinyFormer consistently outperforms recent YOLO-series detectors and the strong DEIMv2 baseline. TinyFormer-X achieves 58.4% AP even without PBM, while adding PBM improves the overall AP to 58.5% and brings a 1.6% AP gain on small objects. With Objects365 pre-training, TinyFormer-X-PBM reaches 60.2% AP, surpassing RF-DETR and other Objects365-pretrained detectors with fewer parameters and lower computation. These results demonstrate that TinyFormer bridges dense YOLO-style feature fusion and DETR-style set prediction, providing a strong accuracy-efficiency trade-off for real-time tiny-object detection. Code is available at https://github.com/mmpmmpmmpjosh/TinyFormer.

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.

Computational imaging enables compact infrared systems, but deep-learning pipelines that combine image reconstruction and object detection often introduce substantial inference latency. Most existing acceleration strategies compress the reconstruction network while overlooking physical priors from the optical path, leaving a trade-off between accuracy and speed. We present Physics-aware Dual-Integrated Network (PDI-Net), a low-latency framework that integrates infrared reconstruction with object detection and further embeds optical priors into the learning process. PDI-Net uses a supervised U-Net during training, while a semi-U-Net encoder shares features directly with a YOLO-based detector during inference, avoiding full image reconstruction. To bridge the gap between fidelity-oriented reconstruction features and detection-oriented semantics, we introduce a physics-aware large-small bridge (PALS-Bridge), which uses field-dependent point spread function priors to adaptively modulate multiscale convolutional branches. A physics-informed optical degradation simulation pipeline is also developed for training and validation. The method is deployed on a single-lens infrared camera, reducing system weight by about 50% compared with traditional multi-lens designs. On the M3FD benchmark under low-SNR conditions, PDI-Net reduces inference time by 84.06% compared with the Rec+Det with pruning strategy while improving [email protected]:0.95 by 5.07%. These results demonstrate compact, low-latency computational infrared imaging for real-time object detection on resource-constrained platforms.

4D automotive radar is indispensable for autonomous driving due to its low cost and robustness, yet its point cloud sparsity challenges 3D object detection. Existing 4D radar-camera fusion methods focus on complex fusion strategies, trading inference speed for marginal gains. This trade-off hinders real-time deployment due to heavy computation on dense feature maps. In contrast, feature extraction from sparse radar points is less time-consuming but remains under-explored. This work uncovers that simply enhancing radar feature extraction can achieve comparable or even higher performance than elaborate fusion modules, while maintaining real-time performance. Based on this finding, we propose RCGDet3D, which centers on radar feature encoding and simplifies multi-modal fusion. Its encoder inherits from the efficient Gaussian Splatting-based Point Gaussian Encoder (PGE) in RadarGaussianDet3D with two key improvements. First, the Ray-centric PGE (R-PGE) predicts Gaussian attributes in ray-aligned coordinate systems before unifying them to Bird's-Eye View (BEV) space, significantly improving geometric consistency and reducing learning difficulty by decoupling the coordinate transformation from representation learning. Second, a Semantic Injection (SI) module incorporates visual cues from images, producing more geometrically accurate and semantically enriched radar features. Experiments on View-of-Delft (VoD) and TJ4DRadSet show that RCGDet3D outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and speed, setting a new benchmark for real-time deployment.

X-ray security inspection requires accurate real-time detection of prohibited items, but existing models often struggle to balance the challenges of severe occlusion, complex clutter, and strict speed requirements. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes GSA-YOLO, a novel lightweight framework built upon the YOLOv8n architecture, specifically engineered to enhance detection robustness and inference efficiency. GSA-YOLO strategically integrates structured sparsity and adaptive knowledge transfer through three core components: Group Lasso (GL) applied to the network neck for robust feature extraction; Sparse Structure Selection (SSS) applied to the detection head for significant model slimming; and an Adaptive Knowledge Distillation (Ada-KD) mechanism for comprehensive accuracy recovery. This integrated approach synergistically enhances feature representation while pruning redundant channels, maximizing model efficiency without sacrificing performance. Rigorous evaluations on the HiXray and PIDray datasets confirm GSA-YOLO's comprehensive capability, achieving a leading inference speed of 189.62 FPS, accompanied by a reduction in computational cost from 8.7G to 8.0G. Crucially, GSA-YOLO secures mAP50:95 results of 0.531 and 0.679 on HiXray and PIDray, demonstrating 2.4% and 1.8% improvements over the baseline, respectively. Compared to other models, GSA-YOLO exhibits enhanced accuracy while maintaining computational efficiency, making it a promising solution for practical X-ray security inspection.

Adverse weather (rain, fog, sand, and snow) degrades camera-based object detection in autonomous vehicles. Existing enhancement-then-detect approaches stall the safety-critical perception loop, violating hard real-time requirements. Progress on this problem is also constrained by an under-recognized evaluation ceiling: ground truth annotated on degraded images cannot credit a detector that recovers objects the annotators themselves could not see, so a genuinely useful enhancement can register as a near-flat F1 gain. This paper presents CADENet (Condition-Adaptive Asynchronous Dual-stream Enhancement Network), a training-free three-thread system: Thread S (YOLOv11n) delivers detections at full frame rate with zero added latency; Thread Q applies condition-adaptive enhancement (CAPE) and fuses results via entropy-guided NMS (EG-NMS) without blocking Thread S; Thread E provides CLIP zero-shot weather classification, so new weather categories require only a new text prompt, with no labeled data and no retraining. Evaluated on 1327 DAWN images (YOLOv11m, IoU = 0.5, confidence = 0.25), CADENet achieves Recall = 0.0103 (micro), F1 = 0.0230 on snow, and F1 = 0.0038 on rain. We formalize the annotation completeness bias on DAWN-class data, so the reported F1 values are lower bounds on the true gain; recall is the annotation-gap-immune headline metric. Thread S sustains approximately 44 FPS regardless of enhancement load. No model retraining or additional sensor hardware is required.

Modern smart vision sensors need on-device intelligence to process video streams, as cloud computing is often impractical due to bandwidth, latency, and privacy constraints. However, these sensory systems typically rely on ultra-low-power microcontrollers (MCUs) with limited memory and compute, making conventional video object detection methods, which require feature storage or multi-frame buffering, unfeasible. To address this challenge, we introduce Multi-Resolution Rescored ByteTrack (MR2-ByteTrack), a Video Object Detection (VOD) method tailored for MCU-based embedded vision nodes. MR2-ByteTrack reduces computational cost by alternating between full- and low-resolution inference, while linking detections across frames via ByteTrack and correcting misclassifications through the Rescore algorithm, which applies probability union rules to aggregate detection confidence scores across frames. We apply our approach to both a CNN-based detector and a Transformer-based model, demonstrating its generality across architectures with fundamentally different spatial processing. Experiments on ImageNetVID demonstrate that MR2-ByteTrack maintains accuracy, achieving mAP scores of up to 49.0 for the CNN-based models and 48.7 for the Transformer, while reducing multiply-accumulate operations by as much as 53% for the CNNs and 32% for the Transformer. When deployed on GAP9, an ultra-low-power RISC-V multicore MCU, our method yields up to 55% energy savings compared to processing only full-resolution images, enabling the first real-time Transformer-based VOD on an MCU-class embedded vision node. Code available at https://github.com/Bomps4/Multi_Resolution_Rescored_ByteTrack/tree/IEEE_Access

Edge object detection on embedded hardware requires balancing inference latency and detection quality under changing resource pressure. We present RAMS, a lightweight runtime controller that monitors device pressure, calibrates switching thresholds from idle behavior, and dynamically selects among three resident YOLOv8 tiers (NANO/SMALL/MEDIUM at 320/416/640 px) without model-reload latency. RAMS defines five switching policies, including two detection-conditioned variants that prevent aggressive downgrades after recent vulnerable-road-user (VRU) detections. We further introduce the VRU-Weighted Accuracy Score (SWAS), a scalar metric for offline policy comparison without ground-truth annotations, together with an oracle-bounded variant that separates detector circularity from genuine tier-retention benefit. Across Raspberry Pi 5, x86 laptops, and Jetson Orin ONNX/TensorRT deployments, the same controller equations operate over a 37x latency range. On Jetson Orin TensorRT under heavy load, the safety2 policy achieves 3.41 ms mean latency, 5.6x faster than fixed-MEDIUM inference, while retaining 74% of its proxy accuracy through near-NANO operation with selective SMALL and MEDIUM locks during VRU-positive windows. Detection-conditioned switching improves SWAS by 25.4% under oracle scoring and 47.3% under detector-derived scoring relative to threshold-only policies under heavy load. Live KITTI evaluation reports per-tier VRU recall of 24.2%, 41.2%, and 59.0%, showing that reactive overrides are fundamentally limited by baseline detector recall.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) enable strong multi-view 3D detection but are limited by high inference latency from dense token and query processing across multiple views and large 3D regions. Existing sparsity methods, designed mainly for 2D vision, prune or merge image tokens but do not extend to full-model sparsity or address 3D object queries. We introduce SToRe3D, a relevance-aligned sparsity framework that jointly selects 2D image tokens and 3D object queries while storing filtered features for reactivation. Mutual 2D-3D relevance heads allocate compute to driving-critical content and preserve other embeddings. Evaluated on nuScenes and our new nuScenes-Relevance benchmark, SToRe3D achieves up to 3x faster inference with marginal accuracy loss, establishing real-time large-scale ViT-based 3D detection while maintaining accuracy on planning-critical agents.

Accurate and efficient battery detection is increasingly important for applications in electronic waste recycling, industrial quality control, and automated sorting systems. In this paper, we present both a comprehensive benchmark and a novel method for multi-class battery detection. We systematically compare three CNN-based detectors (YOLOv8n, YOLOv8s, YOLO11n) and two transformer-based detectors (RT-DETR-L, RT-DETR-X) on a publicly available dataset of approximately 8,591 annotated images under identical experimental conditions, and further propose PaQ-RT-DETR, which introduces pattern-based dynamic query generation into RT-DETR to alleviate query activation imbalance with negligible computational overhead. Among baselines, YOLO11n achieves the best CNN-based accuracy (mAP@50: 0.779) at only 2.6M parameters, while YOLOv8n delivers the fastest inference at ~1,667 FPS. PaQ-RT-DETR-X achieves the highest overall mAP@50 of 0.782, surpassing RT-DETR-X by +2.8% with consistent per-class gains across all six battery categories including the data-scarce Bike Battery class. Our findings provide practical guidance for selecting object detection models in battery-related industrial applications.

The increasing integration of sensors in autonomous maritime navigation has led to large-scale multimodal datasets, raising challenges in achieving efficient real-time perception. In such systems, object detection and trajectory perception of nearby vessels are tightly coupled, particularly in dynamic environments such as maritime navigation. However, the efficiency of object detection models during inference remains an often-overlooked aspect. To this end, we build upon an existing object detection framework by incorporating GPS trajectory data into the inference process to enable input-adaptive computation. Specifically, we introduce an early-exit mechanism in a YOLOv8-based detector that incorporates motion cues - such as inter-vessel distances. Frames of vessels that are separated by short distances, converging with high speed, are processed using the full model, while only a subset of the network's architecture is activated otherwise. The difficulty degree (or scene complexity) of a frame or set of frames per second is evaluated by leveraging inter-object distance and the rate at which the distance between them decreases. Experimental results demonstrate that this strategy maintains satisfactory detection performance while significantly reducing inference time and computational cost, thus enabling a flexible trade-off between accuracy and efficiency compared to full-model inference.

Safe autonomous agents and mobile robots need fast real time 3D perception, especially for vulnerable road users (VRUs) such as pedestrians. We introduce a new bird's eye view (BEV) encoding, which maps the full 3D LiDAR point cloud into a light-weight 2D BEV tensor with three height bands. We explicitly reformulate 3D detection as a 2D detection problem and then reconstruct 3D boxes from the BEV outputs. A single network detects cars, pedestrians, and cyclists in one pass. The backbone uses area attention at deep stages, a hierarchical bidirectional neck over P1 to P4 fuses context and detail, and the head predicts oriented boxes with distribution focal learning for side offsets and a rotated IoU loss. Training applies a small vertical re bin and a mild reflectance jitter in channel space to resist memorization. We use an interquartile range (IQR) filter to remove noisy and outlier LiDAR points during 3D reconstruction. On KITTI dataset, TriBand-BEV attains 58.7/52.6/47.2 pedestrian BEV AP(%) for easy, moderate, and hard at 49 FPS on a single consumer GPU, surpassing Complex-YOLO, with gains of +12.6%, +7.5%, and +3.1%. Qualitative scenes show stable detection under occlusion. The pipeline is compact and ready for real time robotic deployment. Our source code is publicly available on GitHub.

Bronchoscopy is routinely conducted in pulmonary clinics and intensive care units, but navigating the complex branching of the respiratory tract remains challenging. This paper introduces BronchoLumen, a real-time YOLO-based system for detecting bronchial orifices in video bronchoscopy, aiming to assist navigation and CAD systems. The paper investigates if bronchial orifices can be robustly detected across image domains using state-of-the-art object detection and a limited set of public image data. The study includes the description and comparison of YOLOv8, a widely adopted architecture, and YOLOv12, a more recent architecture integrating attention-based modules to improve spatial reasoning. Both models are trained and tested solely on publicly available datasets comprising different image domains. A comparison of both models is conducted based on the common metrics [email protected] and [email protected]:0.9 with the latter emphasizing localization accuracy. For YOLOv8 we obtained a [email protected] of 0.91 on an in-domain and 0.68 on a cross-domain test set. YOLOv12 achieved 0.84 and 0.68 respectively with slightly better localization accuracy with [email protected]:0.9 of 0.48 and 0.26 compared to YOLOv8 with 0.45 and 0.25. Challenges like motion blur and low contrast occasionally entailed uncertainties but the system demonstrated overall robustness in most scenarios. BronchoLumen is an open-weight, YOLO-based solution for bronchial orifice detection offering high accuracy and efficiency across multiple image domains. While the more recent YOLOv12 achieves better localization accuracy, we observed a slightly worse precision. The models have been made publicly available to foster further research in bronchoscopy navigation.

Maritime object detection is critical for the safe navigation of unmanned surface vessels (USVs), requiring accurate recognition of obstacles from small buoys to large vessels. Real-time detection is challenging due to long distances, small object sizes, large-scale variations, edge computing limitations, and the high memory demands of high-resolution imagery. Existing solutions, such as downsampling or image splitting, often reduce accuracy or require additional processing, while memory-efficient models typically handle only limited resolutions. To overcome these limitations, we leverage Vision Mamba (ViM) backbones, which build on State Space Models (SSMs) to capture long-range dependencies while scaling linearly with sequence length. Images are tokenized into sequences for efficient high-resolution processing. For further computational efficiency, we design a tailored Feature Pyramid Network with successive downsampling and SSM layers, as well as token pruning to reduce unnecessary computation on background regions. Compared to state-of-the-art methods like RT-DETR with ResNet50 backbone, our approach achieves a better balance between performance and computational efficiency in maritime object detection.

Modern object detectors are static, fixed-depth networks optimized for a single operating point, requiring separate models for different deployment scenarios. We present an any-depth detection framework that enables a single network to span a continuous range of accuracy--efficiency trade-offs by controlling depth at inference time without retraining. Each backbone and neck stage is divided into an essential path, which always executes, and a skippable refinement path; this decomposition preserves the full multi-scale feature hierarchy at every depth configuration, unlike conventional early exiting that discards entire stages. To train such a network, jointly optimizing many sub-networks of varying depth introduces conflicting gradient signals. We address this via self-distillation between only the two extremes, with prediction-level and feature-level alignment losses that enforce stage-wise modularity, ensuring the outputs of each stage remain compatible regardless of the paths taken. Instantiated on RT-DETR and YOLOv12, our full-depth configurations match or surpass their respective SOTA baselines with negligible parameter overhead, while the most efficient configurations achieve up to $1.82\times$ speedup at a cost of only 2.0 AP, all from a single set of weights.

A Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) is a tethered underwater robot used for tasks like inspection and intervention. While essential tools for underwater science, the high cost of commercial ROVs and a persistent gap between mechanically capable platforms and those with integrated intelligence create a significant barrier to access. HyDRA Scorpion differs from conventional systems by addressing these challenges, integrating an advanced, AI-driven perception stack with in-situ measurement capabilities onto a low-cost, locally manufacturable platform. The system combines 4-DoF maneuverability, dual manipulators, and a custom pressure-tested housing. Experimental results validate the system's robustness and performance. Leak-free operation was confirmed through prolonged pressure testing of the electronics housing to 4 bar, equivalent to the pressure of a 304.8-meter water depth approximately in a simulated environment, with no moisture ingress detected. The vehicle also demonstrated stable station-keeping, maintaining its position within a tight tolerance of $$\pm$0.15$ meters under external disturbances. The onboard AI module achieved underwater object detection mean Average Precision (mAP) of 0.89 with real-time inference, length and 3D-mapping based distance measurement. Also, 4-DoF manipulator arm can grip and maintain dual-function manipulator feature which support 360 degree tangle-free rotation.

Event cameras provide microsecond-level temporal resolution, low latency, and high dynamic range, offering potential for perception under fast motion and challenging illumination conditions. However, existing Event-based Object Detection (EOD) methods face limitations at both the representation and model levels: prior event representations usually encode temporal information indirectly through redundant structures, while detection models struggle to explicitly aggregate fragmented event responses into coherent high-order object features. To address these limitations, we present Event Dual Temporal-Relational Aggregation Detector (Ev-DTAD), a unified EOD framework that integrates representation-level temporal encoding with model-level temporal-hypergraph reasoning. Specifically, we introduce Hierarchical Temporal Aggregation (HTA), a compact three-channel pseudo-RGB representation that explicitly embeds temporal information across intra- and inter-window events. To further enhance detection under sparse and fragmented event responses, we propose Frequency-aware Hypergraph Temporal Fusion (FHTF), which refines multi-scale event features through temporal evolution modeling and high-order relational reasoning. Extensive experiments on Gen1 (+0.8 mAP and 1.7$\times$ faster), 1Mpx/Gen4 (+0.5 mAP and 1.6$\times$ faster), and eTraM (+3.0 mAP and 2.0$\times$ faster) demonstrate that Ev-DTAD achieves a competitive accuracy-efficiency trade-off, validating the complementarity between compact temporal representation and temporal-hypergraph feature reasoning.

Visual perception plays a central role in competitive robotics, where environmental variations can directly affect real-time detection performance. The related literature on transformer-based detectors lack information regarding the impact of backbone scale and environmental settings on model performance. This work presents a comparative evaluation of RT-DETR for detecting round objects under environmental and hyperparameter variations relevant to competitive robotics. Four ResNet backbones (ResNet18, ResNet34, ResNet50, and ResNet101) were compared using dropout rates, analyzing their effect on confidence and accuracy. All models were trained under the same configuration and evaluated under changes in lighting and background contrast. Environmental conditions primarily impact prediction confidence, while inference latency remains largely unaffected and classification accuracy stays consistently high, approaching or above 1.00 in most cases. Two distinct behaviors were observed. Under illumination variation, ResNet50 achieves the best trade-off, combining near-perfect accuracy, confidence values up to approximately 0.869 and latency around 0.058-0.059 ms. Under background variation, ResNet34 provides the most balanced performance, reaching near-perfect accuracy and higher confidence values up to approximately 0.887. These results indicate that the optimal architecture depends on the type of environmental variation, with intermediate-depth models offering the best balance between performance and efficiency.

Real-time object detection on energy-constrained platforms is critical for applications such as UAV-based inspection, autonomous navigation, and mobile robotics. Spiking neural networks (SNNs) on neuromorphic hardware are believed to be significantly more energy-efficient than conventional artificial neural networks (ANNs). In this work, we present a comprehensive methodology for designing general SNN detection architectures targeting neuromorphic platforms, along with the engineering adaptations required to deploy them on the state-of-the-art Neuromorphic processor, Intel Loihi 2. We benchmark SNN-based object detection on Loihi 2 using both frame-based and event-based datasets, comparing performance with ANN-based detection on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano, NVIDIA Jetson Nano B01, and the Apple M2 CPU. Our results show that SNNs on Loihi 2 can perform real-time detection while achieving the lowest per-inference dynamic energy among all platforms. Also, Loihi 2 outperforms the other platforms in terms of power consumption, though ANNs on Jetson Orin Nano achieve higher inference rates. Furthermore, our ANN-to-SNN distillation-aware training enables SNNs to recover 87-100% of the detection accuracy of their ANN counterparts while maintaining lower inference latency; without distillation, SNNs exhibit an 11-27% accuracy drop. These results highlight the potential of neuromorphic systems for energy-efficient, real-time object detection at the edge.

Current pedestrian crossing signals operate on fixed timing without adjustment to pedestrian behavior, which can leave vulnerable road users (VRUs) such as the elderly, disabled, or distracted pedestrians stranded when the light changes. We introduce No Pedestrian Left Behind (NPLB), a real-time adaptive traffic signal system that monitors VRUs in crosswalks and automatically extends signal timing when needed. We evaluated five state-of-the-art object detection models on the BGVP dataset, with YOLOv12 achieving the highest mean Average Precision at 50% ([email protected]) of 0.756. NPLB integrates our fine-tuned YOLOv12 with ByteTrack multi-object tracking and an adaptive controller that extends pedestrian phases when remaining time falls below a critical threshold. Through 10,000 Monte Carlo simulations, we demonstrate that NPLB improves VRU safety by 71.4%, reducing stranding rates from 9.10% to 2.60%, while requiring signal extensions in only 12.1% of crossing cycles.

Weeds compete with crops for light, water, and nutrients, reducing yield and crop quality. Efficient weed detection is essential for site-specific weed management (SSWM). Although deep learning models have been deployed on UAV-based edge systems, a systematic understanding of how different model architectures perform under real-world resource constraints is still lacking. To address this gap, this study proposes a deployment-oriented framework for real-time UAV-based weed detection on resource-constrained edge platforms. The framework integrates UAV data acquisition, model development, and on-device inference, with a focus on balancing detection accuracy and computational efficiency. A diverse set of state-of-the-art object detection models is evaluated, including convolution-based YOLO models (v8-v12) and transformer-based RT-DETR models (v1-v2). Experiments on three edge devices (Jetson Orin Nano, Jetson AGX Xavier, and Jetson AGX Orin) demonstrate clear trade-offs between accuracy and inference latency across models and hardware configurations. Results show that high-capacity models achieve up to 86.9% mAP50 but suffer from high latency, limiting real-time deployment. In contrast, lightweight models achieve 66%-71% mAP50 with significantly lower latency, enabling real-time performance. Among all models, RT-DETRv2-R50-M achieves competitive accuracy (79% mAP50) with improved efficiency, while YOLOv10n provides the fastest inference speed. YOLOv11s and RT-DETRv2-R50-M offer the best balance between accuracy and speed, making them strong candidates for real-time UAV deployment.

Accurate vehicle detection is a critical component of autonomous driving, traffic surveillance, and intelligent transportation systems. This paper presents an enhanced YOLOv8n-based model that integrates the Ghost Module, Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM), and Deformable Convolutional Networks v2 (DCNv2) to improve detection performance. The Ghost Module reduces feature redundancy through efficient feature generation, CBAM refines feature representation via channel and spatial attention, and DCNv2 enhances adaptability to geometric variations in vehicle structures. Evaluated on the KITTI dataset, the proposed model achieves 95.4% [email protected], representing an 8.97% improvement over the baseline YOLOv8n, along with 96.2% precision, 93.7% recall, and a 94.93% F1-score. Comparative analysis against seven state-of-the-art detectors demonstrates consistent superiority across key performance metrics, while ablation studies validate the individual and combined contributions of the integrated modules. By addressing feature redundancy, attention refinement, and spatial adaptability, the proposed approach offers a robust and computationally efficient solution for vehicle detection in diverse and complex traffic environments.

Visual detection of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a critical task in surveillance systems due to their small physical size and environmental challenges. Although deep learning models have achieved significant progress, deploying them on edge devices necessitates the use of lightweight models, such as YOLOv11 Nano, which possess limited learning capacity. In this research, an efficient and context-aware data augmentation pipeline, combining Mosaic strategies and HSV color-space adaptation, is proposed to enhance the performance of these models. Experimental results on four standard datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach, compared to heavy and instance-level methods like Copy-Paste, not only prevents the generation of synthetic artifacts and overfitting but also significantly improves mean Average Precision (mAP) across all scenarios. Furthermore, the evaluation of generalization capability under foggy conditions revealed that the proposed method offers the optimal balance between Precision and stability for real-time systems, whereas alternative methods, such as MixUp, are effective only in specific applications.

Event cameras provide sequential visual data with spatial sparsity and high temporal resolution, making them attractive for low-latency object detection. Existing asynchronous event-based neural networks exploit this low-latency advantage by updating predictions event by event, but still suffer from two bottlenecks: recurrent architectures are difficult to train efficiently on long sequences, and improving accuracy often increases per-event computation and latency. Linear attention is appealing because it enables parallel training and recurrent inference. However, its dense state updates make per-event computation scale with the state size, yielding a poor accuracy-efficiency trade-off for object detection, where accurate localization requires fine-grained spatial states. The key challenge is therefore to introduce sparse state activation that exploits the spatial sparsity of events while preserving efficient parallel training. We propose Spatially-Sparse Linear Attention (SSLA), which introduces a mixture-of-spaces state decomposition and a scatter-compute-gather training procedure, enabling state-level sparsity as well as training parallelism. Building on SSLA, we develop an end-to-end asynchronous linear attention model, SSLA-Det, for low-latency event-based object detection. On Gen1 and N-Caltech101, SSLA-Det achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among asynchronous methods, reaching 0.375 mAP and 0.515 mAP, respectively, while reducing per-event computation by over 20 times compared with the strongest prior asynchronous baseline, demonstrating the potential of linear attention for low-latency event-based vision.

Small object detection in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery is challenging because high-altitude viewpoints produce severe scale variation, weak structural cues, and tight computational budgets. Existing lightweight detectors usually fuse multi-scale features after downsampling, where boundary and texture details have already been attenuated and heterogeneous feature streams may be spatially misaligned. To address these issues, we propose CollabOD, a collaborative detection framework that preserves structural details, aligns cross-path features before fusion, and keeps the detection head lightweight at inference time. CollabOD combines a Dual-Path Fusion Stem, a Dense Aggregation Block, a Bilateral Reweighting Module, and a Unified Detail-Aware Head to strengthen localization-oriented representation while limiting extra computation. On VisDrone, CollabOD obtains 52.4 AP50, 30.8 AP75, and 29.9 AP50:95 with 65.5 GFLOPs; on UAVDT it reaches 31.2 AP50 and 17.4 AP50:95; and on AI-TOD it reaches 45.4 AP50 and 20.0 AP50:95 at 137 FPS. The code is available at: https://github.com/Bai-Xuecheng/CollabOD.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, commonly known as, drones pose increasing risks in civilian and defense settings, demanding accurate and real-time drone detection systems. However, detecting drones is challenging because of their small size, rapid movement, and low visual contrast. A modified architecture of YolovN called the YolovN-CBi is proposed that incorporates the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) and the Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN) to improve sensitivity to small object detections. A curated training dataset consisting of 28K images is created with various flying objects and a local test dataset is collected with 2500 images consisting of very small drone objects. The proposed architecture is evaluated on four benchmark datasets, along with the local test dataset. The baseline Yolov5 and the proposed Yolov5-CBi architecture outperform newer Yolo versions, including Yolov8 and Yolov12, in the speed-accuracy trade-off for small object detection. Four other variants of the proposed CBi architecture are also proposed and evaluated, which vary in the placement and usage of CBAM and BiFPN. These variants are further distilled using knowledge distillation techniques for edge deployment, using a Yolov5m-CBi teacher and a Yolov5n-CBi student. The distilled model achieved a [email protected]:0.9 of 0.6573, representing a 6.51% improvement over the teacher's score of 0.6171, highlighting the effectiveness of the distillation process. The distilled model is 82.9% faster than the baseline model, making it more suitable for real-time drone detection. These findings highlight the effectiveness of the proposed CBi architecture, together with the distilled lightweight models in advancing efficient and accurate real-time detection of small UAVs.