---
license: apache-2.0
pipeline_tag: object-detection
library_name: rfdetr
datasets:
- dronefreak/SeaDronesSee
tags:
- object-detection
- detectionbench
- rfdetr
- pytorch
- computer-vision
- maritime
- uav
- drone
- search-and-rescue
metrics:
- map50
- map50-95
- precision
- recall
- f1
base_model: "Roboflow/rf-detr-medium"
model-index:
- name: RF-DETR Medium Finetuned on SeaDronesSee
results:
- task:
type: object-detection
name: Object Detection
dataset:
name: SeaDronesSee
type: seadronessee
metrics:
- type: mAP50
value: 83.47
name: mAP@50 (val split)
- type: mAP50-95
value: 47.49
name: mAP@50-95 (val split)
- type: precision
value: 87.01
name: Precision (val split)
- type: recall
value: 83.33
name: Recall (val split)
source:
url: https://github.com/dronefreak/DetectionBench
name: DetectionBench
---
# RF-DETR Medium Finetuned on SeaDronesSee
Fine-tuned RF-DETR Medium object detector on the **SeaDronesSee** benchmark dataset, trained and evaluated as part of [DetectionBench](https://github.com/dronefreak/DetectionBench) -- a framework for reproducibly benchmarking modern object detectors with identical training recipes and evaluation metrics across multiple real-world datasets.
---
## Detection Showcase
---
## Performance
| Metric | Score (%) |
| ---------- | --------------- |
| mAP@50 | 83.47 |
| mAP@50-95 | 47.49 |
| Precision | 87.01 |
| Recall | 83.33 |
| F1 Score | 85.13 |
| Parameters | 33.7M |
| FLOPs | N/A (not published upstream) |
---
## Evaluation Protocol
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](https://github.com/dronefreak/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](https://github.com/roboflow/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:
https://huggingface.co/datasets/dronefreak/SeaDronesSee
### Classes
* swimmer
* boat
* jetski
* life_saving_appliances
* buoy
---
## Usage
### Install Dependencies
```bash
pip install rfdetr huggingface_hub
```
### Load Model from Hugging Face
```python
from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download
import rfdetr
weights = hf_hub_download(
repo_id="dronefreak/seadronessee-rfdetr-medium",
filename="checkpoint_best_total.pth"
)
model = rfdetr.RFDETRMedium(pretrain_weights=weights)
```
### Run Inference
```python
detections = model.predict("image.jpg", threshold=0.25)
```
---
## Training Configuration
| Setting | Value |
| ---------------- | -------------------------------- |
| Dataset | SeaDronesSee |
| Framework | RF-DETR |
| Training Toolkit | DetectionBench |
| Epochs (configured max) | 500 |
| Epochs (actually trained) | 123 |
| Early Stopping Patience | 100 |
| Batch Size | 5 |
| Resolution | 576 |
| Optimizer | adamw |
| Learning Rate | 0.0001 |
| Seed | 42 |
---
## Repository Contents
```text
checkpoint_best_total.pth
metrics.csv
config.json
seadronessee_rfdetr-medium_showcase.jpg
README.md
```
---
## Related Resources
* [SeaDronesSee dataset card](https://huggingface.co/datasets/dronefreak/SeaDronesSee) on Hugging Face
* [DetectionBench](https://github.com/dronefreak/DetectionBench) -- reproducible benchmarks for modern object detectors on real-world datasets
---
## Training Framework
This model was trained using [DetectionBench](https://github.com/dronefreak/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: `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:
1. The SeaDronesSee dataset (see below)
2. The original RF-DETR Medium 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
```
@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
@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}
}
```
Other architectures compared against on SeaDronesSee in this model card:
### YOLOv11
```bibtex
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}
}
```
### YOLOv26
```bibtex
@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
```bibtex
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}
}
```
```bibtex
@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}
}
```