RTMDet vs YOLOX

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.

YOLOX is an anchor-free object detection model developed by Megvii (Face++), released in July 2021 under the Apache 2.0 license. It applies anchor-free detection to the YOLO framework, decoupling the classification and regression heads to allow each to optimize independently, and introduces the SimOTA label assignment strategy for improved training convergence. YOLOX achieves strong accuracy-speed tradeoffs and outperforms YOLOv5 on COCO at comparable model sizes.

YOLOX-L achieves 50.0% AP on COCO at 68.9 FPS on an NVIDIA V100 GPU. The model is available in a range of sizes from YOLOX-Nano to YOLOX-X and supports deployment through ONNX, TensorRT, and other standard export formats. It is suitable for real-time object detection applications and has been widely adopted in industrial and research detection pipelines.