Multiscale Real-Time Object Detection in the NMS-Free Era: A Comparative Performance Evaluation of YOLOv8 and YOLO26 文章

arXiv:2605.24831v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) remains a key post-processing step in many real-time object detection pipelines, but it can introduce latency variation and deployment complexity in resource-constrained settings. Recent NMS-free designs such as YOLO26 aim to reduce this dependence through end-to-end detection, yet their performance relative to established NMS-based models such as YOLOv8 remains underexplored beyond standard benchmarks. This paper compares YOLOv8 and YOLO26 on Pascal VOC and VisDrone, representing general object detection and dense aerial small-object detection, respectively. Both model families are evaluated across five scales using accuracy, localization, model size, GFLOPs, and CPU/GPU latency. Results show that YOLO26 achieves stronger detection performance and lower model complexity on Pascal VOC across most scales, while the performance gap narrows on VisDrone, where both models struggle with dense small targets.