dronefreak/seadronessee-yolo11x
YOLOv11x Finetuned on SeaDronesSee
Fine-tuned YOLOv11x 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.
<br>
<!-- ROW 1: Identity & Tech Stack --> <div style="display: flex; justify-content: center; align-items: center; gap: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; flex-wrap: wrap;"> <img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/Task-ObjectDetection-blue?style=flat-square" alt="Task"> <img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/Framework-UltralyticsYOLO-0aa1a7?style=flat-square" alt="Framework"> <img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/Base_Model-YOLOv11x-purple?style=flat-square" alt="Base Model"> </div>
<!-- ROW 2: Performance Metrics --> <div style="display: flex; justify-content: center; align-items: center; gap: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; flex-wrap: wrap;"> <img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/mAP@50-74.82%25-success?style=flat-square" alt="mAP@50"> <img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/mAP@50:95-45.56%25-orange?style=flat-square" alt="mAP@50:95"> <img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/Params-57.0M-lightgrey?style=flat-square" alt="Params"> </div>
<!-- ROW 3: Metadata --> <div style="display: flex; justify-content: center; align-items: center; gap: 8px; margin-bottom: 24px; flex-wrap: wrap;"> <img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/License-AGPL--3.0-lightgrey?style=flat-square" alt="License"> <a href="https://github.com/dronefreak/DetectionBench"><img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/Source-DetectionBench-black?style=flat-square" alt="Source"></a> </div>
Detection Showcase
<p align="center"> <img src="seadronesseeyolo11xshowcase.jpg" alt="SeaDronesSee Detection Demo" width="900"> </p>
Performance
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 for the smaller, curated comparison set used on the project README.
Per-Class Performance
Evaluation Visualizations
Precision-Recall Curve
F1 Curve
Confusion Matrix
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
- lifesavingappliances
- buoy ---
Usage
Install Dependencies
pip install ultralytics huggingface_hubLoad Model from Hugging Face
from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download
from ultralytics import YOLO
weights = hf_hub_download(
repo_id="dronefreak/seadronessee-yolo11x",
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
confusion_matrix.png
val_batch0_pred.jpg
seadronessee_yolo11x_showcase.jpg
README.mdRelated Resources
- SeaDronesSee 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:
swimmer(64.22%) andboat(22.55%) account for roughly 87% of all annotated boxes in the training set, whilelife_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 thevalidsplit instead oftest-- 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 YOLOv11x 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}
}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 SeaDronesSee 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}
}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}
}@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}
}