RTMDet vs YOLOv12

RTMDet is a real-time object detection model developed by OpenMMLab, released in December 2022 under the GPL-3.0 license. It adopts a single-stage detection architecture with large-kernel depthwise convolution in both the backbone and neck, enabling it to capture long-range spatial dependencies without the computational cost of full self-attention. The model family spans from RTMDet-tiny to RTMDet-x, covering a wide range of speed-accuracy operating points.

RTMDet-x achieves 52.6% AP on COCO at 114 FPS on an NVIDIA 3090 GPU. The architecture supports instance segmentation and rotated object detection variants. RTMDet is included in the OpenMMLab ecosystem and is well suited for applications requiring fast, accurate detection with flexible model sizing.

YOLOv12 is an attention-centric real-time object detection model developed by researchers at Tsinghua University, with the arXiv paper published in February 2025 under the AGPL-3.0 license. It introduces an Area Attention module that partitions feature maps into regions and applies self-attention within each region, reducing the quadratic complexity of full self-attention while capturing long-range dependencies. It also incorporates R-ELAN for improved feature aggregation and scaled residual connections for training stability.

YOLOv12-L achieves 54.0% AP on COCO, while the YOLOv12-N variant achieves 40.5% mAP at 1.62ms latency on an NVIDIA T4 GPU. The model is built on the Ultralytics codebase, supporting detection, segmentation, and other standard YOLO tasks at competitive real-time speeds.