arXiv Computer Vision

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

The paper evaluates the new YOLO26 architecture, which offers NMS-free end-to-end inference and is tailored for CPU-based edge devices, against three earlier Ultralytics models (YOLOv5u, YOLOv8, and YOLO11) in aquaculture fish mortality detection. Across nano, small, and medium scales, all models achieved similar detection accuracy on a full dataset, but differences emerged in data efficiency and deployment performance: YOLOv8 reached 90% mAP50 with only 400 images, while YOLO26 variants needed 1,000 images; YOLO26n was fastest on a Raspberry Pi 5 (7.51 FPS), whereas YOLOv5mu led on CPU-based hardware. The study concludes that architectural novelty alone does not dictate suitability for edge AI in aquaculture; training data size, target hardware, and inference needs must be jointly considered.

arXiv AI
Sep 17

Ultralytics YOLO Evolution: An Overview of YOLO27, YOLO26, YOLO11, YOLOv8, and YOLOv5 Object Detectors for Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

This paper provides a detailed overview of the Ultralytics YOLO family from YOLOv5 to YOLO27, highlighting key architectural changes, benchmarking results, and deployment considerations. It discusses the evolution of each version—YOLO27’s scale‑adaptive dual architecture, YOLO26’s loss and optimization refinements, YOLO11’s efficiency focus, YOLOv8’s anchor‑free detection, and YOLOv5’s modular ecosystem—alongside performance metrics on COCO and latency on TensorRT. The review also surveys applications in robotics, agriculture, surveillance, and manufacturing, and outlines future challenges such as dense scene handling, CNN‑Transformer integration, and hardware‑aware optimization.

By Ranjan Sapkota, Manoj Karkee
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 5

FUSEye: Training-Light Fisheye Detection with Overlapping Views and Zero-Initialized Adapters

FUSEye is a lightweight training framework that adapts a frozen COCO‑pretrained YOLO26‑x detector for fisheye images by adding only about 227k parameters. It introduces three modules: GridViews to enlarge compressed boundary regions, Z‑Adapters to correct distortion‑induced feature misalignment, and AgreeFusion to fuse detections across overlapping views. On the WoodScape fisheye benchmark, FUSEye boosts YOLO26‑x mAP50 from 0.148 to 0.266 while requiring only 25% of the labeled data to achieve 0.2597 mAP50, and it also improves YOLOv8‑11 detectors.

By Wenya Su, Kai Luo, Di Wen, Ruiping Liu, Yufan Chen, Junwei Zheng, Kunyu Peng, Kailun Yang
arXiv Computer Vision
Oct 23

EdgeCrafter: Compact ViTs for Edge Dense Prediction via Task-Specialized Distillation

EdgeCrafter presents a compact Vision Transformer framework tailored for edge dense prediction tasks such as object detection, instance segmentation, and human pose estimation. By employing task-specialized distillation and an edge-friendly encoder-decoder design, the ECDet backbone achieves 51.7 box AP with under 10 M parameters, while its extensions reach 48.4 mask AP and 74.8 keypoint AP using only COCO annotations. Pretraining on Objects365 further boosts performance, demonstrating that lightweight ViTs can compete with CNN-based models on resource-constrained devices.

By Longfei Liu, Yongjie Hou, Yang Li, Qirui Wang, Youyang Sha, Yongjun Yu, Yinzhi Wang, Peizhe Ru, Xuanlong Yu, Xi Shen
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 25

Comparing YOLOv11 and YOLOv8 for instance segmentation of occluded and non-occluded immature green fruits in complex orchard environment

This study evaluates the instance‑segmentation performance of YOLOv11 and YOLOv8 on immature green apples in orchard settings. YOLO11n‑seg achieved the highest mask precision (0.831), while YOLO11m‑seg and YOLO11l‑seg excelled in non‑occluded and occluded fruitlet segmentation. YOLOv8n, however, outperformed the YOLO11 series in inference speed, reaching 3.3 ms compared to 4.8 ms for the fastest YOLO11 model.

By Ranjan Sapkota, Manoj Karkee
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

Optimizing YOLO27, YOLO26, YOLO11, and YOLOv8 for Fine-Grained Small-Object Detection and Segmentation in Complex Orchard Environments

The paper compares Ultralytics YOLO27, YOLO26, YOLO11, and YOLOv8 for detecting and segmenting small fruit parts in orchard settings. It evaluates five model scales across 30 experiments, finding that YOLO11s-960 and YOLO26s-960 achieve the best mask and box mAP scores while maintaining efficient parameter counts. The study also highlights the difficulty of peduncle detection and provides publicly available code and models for reproducibility.

By Ranjan Sapkota, Manoj Karkee