Kanyifeechukwu J. Oguine

arXiv2026

YOLO26 vs. YOLOv8: A Comprehensive Architectural Benchmark of Next-Generation Real-Time Object Detection Models

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.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

From Generalization to Precision: Exploring SAM for Tool Segmentation in Surgical Environments

Purpose: Accurate tool segmentation is essential in computer-aided procedures. However, this task conveys challenges due to artifacts' presence and the limited training data in medical scenarios. Methods that generalize to unseen data represent an interesting venue, where zero-shot segmentation presents an option to account for data limitation. Initial exploratory works with the Segment Anything Model (SAM) show that bounding-box-based prompting presents notable zero-short generalization. However, point-based prompting leads to a degraded performance that further deteriorates under image corruption. We argue that SAM drastically over-segment images with high corruption levels, resulting in degraded performance when only a single segmentation mask is considered, while the combination of the masks overlapping the object of interest generates an accurate prediction. Method: We use SAM to generate the over-segmented prediction of endoscopic frames. Then, we employ the ground-truth tool mask to analyze the results of SAM when the best single mask is selected as prediction and when all the individual masks overlapping the object of interest are combined to obtain the final predicted mask. We analyze the Endovis18 and Endovis17 instrument segmentation datasets using synthetic corruptions of various strengths and an In-House dataset featuring counterfactually created real-world corruptions. Results: Combining the over-segmented masks contributes to improvements in the IoU. Furthermore, selecting the best single segmentation presents a competitive IoU score for clean images. Conclusions: Combined SAM predictions present improved results and robustness up to a certain corruption level. However, appropriate prompting strategies are fundamental for implementing these models in the medical domain.

cs.CV↗