DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection

Recently, end-to-end transformer-based detectors (DETRs) have achieved remarkable performance. However, the issue of the high computational cost of DETRs has not been effectively addressed, limiting their practical application and preventing them from fully exploiting the benefits of no post-processing, such as non-maximum suppression (NMS). In this paper, we first analyze the influence of NMS in modern real-time object detectors on inference speed, and establish an end-to-end speed benchmark. To avoid the inference delay caused by NMS, we propose a Real-Time DEtection TRansformer (RT-DETR), the first real-time end-to-end object detector to our best knowledge. Specifically, we design an efficient hybrid encoder to efficiently process multi-scale features by decoupling the intra-scale interaction and cross-scale fusion, and propose IoU-aware query selection to improve the initialization of object queries. In addition, our proposed detector supports flexibly adjustment of the inference speed by using different decoder layers without the need for retraining, which facilitates the practical application of real-time object detectors. Our RT-DETR-L achieves 53.0% AP on COCO val2017 and 114 FPS on T4 GPU, while RT-DETR-X achieves 54.8% AP and 74 FPS, outperforming all YOLO detectors of the same scale in both speed and accuracy. Furthermore, our RT-DETR-R50 achieves 53.1% AP and 108 FPS, outperforming DINO-Deformable-DETR-R50 by 2.2% AP in accuracy and by about 21 times in FPS. Source code and pretrained models will be available at PaddleDetection.

PP-YOLOE: An evolved version of YOLO

In this report, we present PP-YOLOE, an industrial state-of-the-art object detector with high performance and friendly deployment. We optimize on the basis of the previous PP-YOLOv2, using anchor-free paradigm, more powerful backbone and neck equipped with CSPRepResStage, ET-head and dynamic label assignment algorithm TAL. We provide s/m/l/x models for different practice scenarios. As a result, PP-YOLOE-l achieves 51.4 mAP on COCO test-dev and 78.1 FPS on Tesla V100, yielding a remarkable improvement of (+1.9 AP, +13.35% speed up) and (+1.3 AP, +24.96% speed up), compared to the previous state-of-the-art industrial models PP-YOLOv2 and YOLOX respectively. Further, PP-YOLOE inference speed achieves 149.2 FPS with TensorRT and FP16-precision. We also conduct extensive experiments to verify the effectiveness of our designs. Source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleDetection.

PP-PicoDet: A Better Real-Time Object Detector on Mobile Devices

The better accuracy and efficiency trade-off has been a challenging problem in object detection. In this work, we are dedicated to studying key optimizations and neural network architecture choices for object detection to improve accuracy and efficiency. We investigate the applicability of the anchor-free strategy on lightweight object detection models. We enhance the backbone structure and design the lightweight structure of the neck, which improves the feature extraction ability of the network. We improve label assignment strategy and loss function to make training more stable and efficient. Through these optimizations, we create a new family of real-time object detectors, named PP-PicoDet, which achieves superior performance on object detection for mobile devices. Our models achieve better trade-offs between accuracy and latency compared to other popular models. PicoDet-S with only 0.99M parameters achieves 30.6% mAP, which is an absolute 4.8% improvement in mAP while reducing mobile CPU inference latency by 55% compared to YOLOX-Nano, and is an absolute 7.1% improvement in mAP compared to NanoDet. It reaches 123 FPS (150 FPS using Paddle Lite) on mobile ARM CPU when the input size is 320. PicoDet-L with only 3.3M parameters achieves 40.9% mAP, which is an absolute 3.7% improvement in mAP and 44% faster than YOLOv5s. As shown in Figure 1, our models far outperform the state-of-the-art results for lightweight object detection. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleDetection.

PP-YOLOv2: A Practical Object Detector

Being effective and efficient is essential to an object detector for practical use. To meet these two concerns, we comprehensively evaluate a collection of existing refinements to improve the performance of PP-YOLO while almost keep the infer time unchanged. This paper will analyze a collection of refinements and empirically evaluate their impact on the final model performance through incremental ablation study. Things we tried that didn't work will also be discussed. By combining multiple effective refinements, we boost PP-YOLO's performance from 45.9% mAP to 49.5% mAP on COCO2017 test-dev. Since a significant margin of performance has been made, we present PP-YOLOv2. In terms of speed, PP-YOLOv2 runs in 68.9FPS at 640x640 input size. Paddle inference engine with TensorRT, FP16-precision, and batch size = 1 further improves PP-YOLOv2's infer speed, which achieves 106.5 FPS. Such a performance surpasses existing object detectors with roughly the same amount of parameters (i.e., YOLOv4-CSP, YOLOv5l). Besides, PP-YOLOv2 with ResNet101 achieves 50.3% mAP on COCO2017 test-dev. Source code is at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleDetection.