Fine-tuned RF-DETR Medium object detector on the SeaDronesSee benchmark dataset, trained and evaluated as part of DetectionBench -- a framework for reproducibly benchmarking modern object detectors with identical training recipes and evaluation metrics across multiple real-world datasets.
Metrics reported in this model card are computed on the SeaDronesSee val split, using DetectionBench's standard evaluation pipeline (detectionbench-evaluate).
SeaDronesSee Model Zoo
Every model DetectionBench has trained and evaluated on SeaDronesSee so far, for full transparency -- see DetectionBench for the smaller, curated comparison set used on the project README.
Model
mAP@50
mAP@50-95
Precision
Recall
RF-DETR Medium
83.47
47.49
87.01
83.33
YOLOv26m
82.38
49.57
90.01
81.18
RF-DETR Small
80.97
45.31
85.68
80.16
YOLOv26s
80.14
47.35
88.5
77.51
YOLOv11x
74.82
45.56
87.37
72.46
YOLOv8s
72.94
43.05
84.52
71.25
RF-DETR Nano
72.38
39.83
81.37
74.08
YOLOv11n
69.93
40.41
82.87
69.04
YOLOv8n
69.22
40.35
82.46
68.36
YOLOv8m
62.08
34.41
77.3
61.01
Per-Class Performance
Class
mAP@50
mAP@50-95
swimmer
76.06
30.44
boat
95.71
69.35
jetski
93.55
64.16
life_saving_appliances
70.55
25.24
buoy
81.49
48.26
Evaluation Visualizations
This model was evaluated with Supervision's detection metrics, which report mAP/Precision/Recall directly but don't produce PR-curve, F1-curve, or confusion-matrix plot images the way Ultralytics' validator does. See the Performance table above for Precision/Recall/F1 and the per-class table above for the full per-class mAP breakdown.
Dataset
This model was trained on SeaDronesSee. For the full dataset description, provenance, license, and citation, see the dataset card:
DetectionBench -- reproducible benchmarks for modern object detectors on real-world datasets
Training Framework
This model was trained using DetectionBench, an open-source framework for benchmarking object detectors across multiple real-world datasets with a common pipeline.
Features include:
A dataset-adapter registry for converting real-world datasets into a canonical format
Identical training/evaluation recipes across model families (Ultralytics YOLO/RT-DETR, RF-DETR)
One-command reproducibility via versioned Hydra configs
If you find this model useful, please consider starring the repository.
Known Limitations
Severe class imbalance: swimmer (64.22%) and boat (22.55%) account for roughly 87% of all annotated boxes in the training set, while life_saving_appliances (1.60%) is rare -- per-class accuracy on the minority classes is measured on comparatively few examples.
Small-object heavy: objects are captured from altitude over open water, so roughly 79% of boxes cover under 0.1% of the image area -- swimmers and buoys in particular are small, low-contrast targets against water.
No public test-split labels: the official images/test/ split is a held-out competition set with no released ground truth, so these models are evaluated on the valid split instead of test -- the number reported here is not directly comparable to official SeaDronesSee leaderboard submissions, which score against the held-out test set via the benchmark's own server.
A maritime search-and-rescue benchmark specifically: generalization to non-maritime aerial scenes, different water/lighting conditions, or altitudes outside this dataset's capture range is untested.
Citation
If you use this model in your research, please consider citing:
The SeaDronesSee dataset (see below)
The original RF-DETR Medium architecture (see below)
The other model architectures shown in the Model Zoo/External Comparison tables above, if you reference their results
DetectionBench, the training/evaluation framework used to produce this checkpoint
@inproceedings{varga2022seadronessee,
title={SeaDronesSee: A maritime benchmark for detecting humans in open water},
author={Varga, Leon Amadeus and Kiefer, Benjamin and Messmer, Martin and Zell, Andreas},
booktitle={Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision},
pages={2260--2270},
year={2022}
}
@misc{varga2021seadronesseemaritimebenchmarkdetecting,
title={SeaDronesSee: A Maritime Benchmark for Detecting Humans in Open Water},
author={Leon Amadeus Varga and Benjamin Kiefer and Martin Messmer and Andreas Zell},
year={2021},
eprint={2105.01922},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CV},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.01922}
}
bibtex
1@inproceedings{robinson2026rfdetr,
2 title = {RF-DETR: Real-Time Detection Transformer},
3 author = {Robinson, Isaac and Robicheaux, Peter and Popov, Matvei and Ramanan, Deva and Peri, Neehar},
4 booktitle = {International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
5 year = {2026},
6 url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09554}
7}
89@article{oquab2023dinov2,
10 title={DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision},
11 author={Oquab, Maxime and Darcet, Timoth{\'e}e and Moutakanni, Theo and Vo, Huy and Szafraniec, Marc and Khalidov, Vasil and Fernandez, Pierre and Haziza, Daniel and Massa, Francisco and El-Nouby, Alaaeldin and others},
12 journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.07193},
13 year={2023}
14}
Other architectures compared against on SeaDronesSee in this model card:
YOLOv11
bibtex
1No official YOLO11 research paper has been published by Ultralytics; the most commonly cited independent architectural analysis is used instead:
23@article{khanam2024yolov11,
4 title={YOLOv11: An Overview of the Key Architectural Enhancements},
5 author={Khanam, Rahima and Hussain, Muhammad},
6 journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.17725},
7 year={2024}
8}
YOLOv26
bibtex
1@article{jocher2026yolo26,
2 title={Ultralytics YOLO26: Unified Real-Time End-to-End Vision Models},
3 author={Jocher, Glenn and Qiu, Jing and Liu, Mengyu and Lyu, Shuai and Akyon, Fatih Cagatay and Kalfaoglu, Muhammet Esat},
4 journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.03748},
5 year={2026}
6}
YOLOv8
bibtex
1No official YOLOv8 research paper has been published by Ultralytics; this is their own recommended software citation instead:
23@software{jocher2023yolov8,
4 author = {Glenn Jocher and Ayush Chaurasia and Jing Qiu},
5 title = {Ultralytics YOLOv8},
6 version = {8.0.0},
7 year = {2023},
8 url = {https://github.com/ultralytics/ultralytics},
9 license = {AGPL-3.0}
10}
bibtex
1@software{Saksena_DetectionBench_2026,
2 author = {Saksena, Saumya Kumaar},
3 title = {DetectionBench: Reproducible Benchmarks for Modern Object Detectors on Real-World Datasets},
4 url = {https://github.com/dronefreak/DetectionBench},
5 year = {2026}
6}