YOLOv11n Finetuned on VisDrone-DET

Fine-tuned YOLOv11n object detector on the VisDrone-DET 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.

Performance

Evaluation Protocol

Metrics reported in this model card are computed on the VisDrone-DET test split, using DetectionBench's standard evaluation pipeline (detectionbench-evaluate).

VisDrone-DET Model Zoo

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

Earlier VisDrone-DET Results (Companion Codebase)

The rows below are earlier VisDrone2019-DET runs (test split) from a separate companion codebase (VisDrone-dataset-python-toolkit), not reproduced inside DetectionBench and kept here for context and history. Where a model also appears in the Model Zoo table above, that row is the current DetectionBench run and supersedes the one here -- for example the earlier YOLOv9t run used 640 px inputs and 300 epochs, while the current DetectionBench YOLO runs use 1280 px. The RF-DETR rows are earlier DetectionBench-trained runs at RF-DETR's default input sizes (384/512/576 px).

Per-Class Performance

Evaluation Visualizations

Precision-Recall Curve

F1 Curve

Confusion Matrix

Normalized Confusion Matrix

Dataset

This model was trained on VisDrone-DET. For the full dataset description, provenance, license, and citation, see the dataset card:

https://huggingface.co/datasets/Voxel51/VisDrone2019-DET

Classes

• pedestrian
• people
• bicycle
• car
• van
• truck
• tricycle
• awning-tricycle
• bus
• motor
• others

Usage

Install Dependencies

pip install ultralytics huggingface_hub

Load Model from Hugging Face

from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download
from ultralytics import YOLO

weights = hf_hub_download(
    repo_id="dronefreak/visdrone-yolov11n",
    filename="best.pt"
)

model = YOLO(weights)

Run Inference

results = model.predict(
    source="image.jpg",
    conf=0.25
)

results[0].show()

Training Configuration

Repository Contents

best.pt
results.csv
args.yaml
BoxPR_curve.png
BoxF1_curve.png
BoxP_curve.png
BoxR_curve.png
confusion_matrix.png
confusion_matrix_normalized.png
val_batch0_pred.jpg
visdrone_yolo11n_showcase.jpg
assets/demo_banner.mp4
assets/demo_banner_poster.jpg
README.md

Related Resources

• VisDrone-DET 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

• Severe class imbalance: car (42.21%) and pedestrian (23.12%) account for two-thirds of all annotated boxes in the training set, while awning-tricycle (0.95%) and tricycle (1.40%) are rare -- the others class has zero annotated instances in the training set entirely and is effectively unusable (always 0 AP).
• Extreme small-object density: ~53 annotated boxes per image on average, with roughly 69% of boxes covering under 0.1% of the image area -- consistent with VisDrone's aerial small-object detection challenge (objects captured from significant altitude).
• The original authors license VisDrone under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 -- non-commercial research use only (see the dataset's homepage); this applies to any model trained on it, not only the raw images.
• These RF-DETR checkpoints were trained/evaluated directly through DetectionBench. The YOLO/RT-DETR rows in the External VisDrone Model Zoo comparison below were trained via a separate companion codebase, not reproduced inside DetectionBench -- see that collection for their own training details and caveats.

Citation

If you use this model in your research, please consider citing:

1. The VisDrone-DET dataset (see below)
2. The original YOLOv11n architecture (see below)
3. The other model architectures shown in the Model Zoo/External Comparison tables above, if you reference their results
4. DetectionBench, the training/evaluation framework used to produce this checkpoint

@article{zhu2018vision,
  title={Vision meets drones: A challenge},
  author={Zhu, Pengfei and Wen, Longyin and Bian, Xiao and Ling, Haibin and Hu, Qinghua},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.07437},
  year={2018}
}

No official YOLO11 research paper has been published by Ultralytics; the most commonly cited independent architectural analysis is used instead:

@article{khanam2024yolov11,
  title={YOLOv11: An Overview of the Key Architectural Enhancements},
  author={Khanam, Rahima and Hussain, Muhammad},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.17725},
  year={2024}
}

Other architectures compared against on VisDrone-DET in this model card:

RF-DETR

@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}
}

YOLOv10

@article{wang2024yolov10,
  title={YOLOv10: Real-Time End-to-End Object Detection},
  author={Wang, Ao and Chen, Hui and Liu, Lihao and Chen, Kai and Lin, Zijia and Han, Jungong and Ding, Guiguang},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.14458},
  year={2024}
}

YOLOv26

@article{jocher2026yolo26,
  title={Ultralytics YOLO26: Unified Real-Time End-to-End Vision Models},
  author={Jocher, Glenn and Qiu, Jing and Liu, Mengyu and Lyu, Shuai and Akyon, Fatih Cagatay and Kalfaoglu, Muhammet Esat},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.03748},
  year={2026}
}

YOLOv8

No official YOLOv8 research paper has been published by Ultralytics; this is their own recommended software citation instead:

@software{jocher2023yolov8,
  author = {Glenn Jocher and Ayush Chaurasia and Jing Qiu},
  title = {Ultralytics YOLOv8},
  version = {8.0.0},
  year = {2023},
  url = {https://github.com/ultralytics/ultralytics},
  license = {AGPL-3.0}
}

YOLOv9

@article{wang2024yolov9,
  title={YOLOv9: Learning What You Want to Learn Using Programmable Gradient Information},
  author={Wang, Chien-Yao and Yeh, I-Hau and Liao, Hong-Yuan Mark},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.13616},
  year={2024}
}

@software{Saksena_DetectionBench_2026,
  author = {Saksena, Saumya Kumaar},
  title = {DetectionBench: Reproducible Benchmarks for Modern Object Detectors on Real-World Datasets},
  url = {https://github.com/dronefreak/DetectionBench},
  year = {2026}
}