RF-DETR Small Finetuned on LISA Traffic Lights

Fine-tuned RF-DETR Small object detector on the LISA Traffic Lights 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.

Usage

Install Dependencies

pip install rfdetr huggingface_hub

Load Model from Hugging Face

from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download
import rfdetr

weights = hf_hub_download(
    repo_id="dronefreak/lisa-rfdetr-small",
    filename="checkpoint_best_total.pth"
)

model = rfdetr.RFDETRSmall(pretrain_weights=weights)

Run Inference

detections = model.predict("image.jpg", threshold=0.25)

Performance

Evaluated on the LISA Traffic Lights test split, using DetectionBench's standard evaluation pipeline (detectionbench-evaluate).

LISA Traffic Lights Model Zoo

Every model DetectionBench has trained and evaluated on LISA Traffic Lights so far, for full transparency -- see DetectionBench for the smaller, curated comparison set used on the project README.

Per-Class Performance

This model was evaluated with Supervision's detection metrics, which report mAP/Precision/Recall directly but don't produce a confusion-matrix plot the way Ultralytics' validator does.

Dataset

This model was trained on LISA Traffic Lights. For the full dataset description, provenance, license, and citation, see the dataset card:

https://huggingface.co/datasets/dronefreak/LISA-Traffic-Lights

Classes

• go
• goForward
• goLeft
• stop
• stopLeft
• warning
• warningLeft

Training Configuration

Repository Contents

checkpoint_best_total.pth
metrics.csv
config.json
lisa_rfdetr-small_showcase.jpg
README.md

Related Resources

• LISA Traffic Lights dataset card on Hugging Face
• 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)
• Hardware profiling (latency, FPS, VRAM, parameters, FLOPs)
• One-command reproducibility via versioned Hydra configs

If you find this model useful, please consider starring the repository.

Known Limitations

• Rare/underrepresented arrow classes (goForward, goLeft, stopLeft, warningLeft) have far fewer training examples than the base go/stop/warning classes and correspondingly lower detection accuracy across every model in this zoo.
• Sequential dashcam video frames mean visually similar consecutive frames can appear within the same split; performance on genuinely novel scenes may differ from the reported test-split numbers.
• Trained and evaluated only on San Diego daytime/nighttime driving sequences (Pacific Beach, La Jolla); generalization to different traffic-light hardware, road layouts, or camera setups is untested.
• Small, distant traffic lights are harder to detect reliably, consistent with general small-object detection challenges.

Citation

If you use this model in your research, please consider citing the dataset and the model architecture:

@article{jensen2016vision,
  title={Vision for looking at traffic lights: Issues, survey, and perspectives},
  author={Jensen, Morten Born{\o} and Philipsen, Mark Philip and M{\o}gelmose, Andreas and Moeslund, Thomas Baltzer and Trivedi, Mohan Manubhai},
  journal={IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems},
  volume={17},
  number={7},
  pages={1800--1815},
  year={2016},
  doi={10.1109/TITS.2015.2509509},
  publisher={IEEE}
}

@inproceedings{philipsen2015traffic,
  title={Traffic light detection: A learning algorithm and evaluations on challenging dataset},
  author={Philipsen, Mark Philip and Jensen, Morten Born{\o} and M{\o}gelmose, Andreas and Moeslund, Thomas B and Trivedi, Mohan M},
  booktitle={Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), 2015 IEEE 18th International Conference on},
  pages={2341--2345},
  year={2015},
  organization={IEEE}
}

@inproceedings{robinson2026rfdetr,
  title     = {RF-DETR: Real-Time Detection Transformer},
  author    = {Robinson, Isaac and Robicheaux, Peter and Popov, Matvei and Ramanan, Deva and Peri, Neehar},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)},
  year      = {2026},
  url       = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09554}
}

@article{oquab2023dinov2,
  title={DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision},
  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},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.07193},
  year={2023}
}