Object Detection

Object detection — finding what's in an image and where — is the backbone of autonomous vehicles, surveillance, and robotics. The two-stage R-CNN lineage (2014–2017) gave way to single-shot detectors like YOLO, now in its 11th iteration and still getting faster. DETR (2020) proved transformers could replace hand-designed components like NMS entirely, spawning a family of end-to-end detectors that dominate COCO leaderboards above 60 mAP. The field's current obsession: open-vocabulary detection that works on any object described in natural language, not just fixed categories.