Roboflow: RF-DETR Segmentation

YOLOv8 Instance Segmentation is the segmentation variant of the YOLOv8 model developed by Ultralytics, released in January 2023 under the AGPL-3.0 license. It extends the standard YOLOv8 detection head with a mask prediction branch that generates pixel-level segmentation masks for each detected object using a prototype mask approach. This enables real-time instance segmentation within a single forward pass.YOLOv8 Instance Segmentation shares the same backbone and neck architecture as the base detection model and is available in the same size range. It is deployable through Roboflow Inference and supports fine-tuning on custom COCO-format segmentation datasets. It is suited for applications requiring both object localization and precise mask prediction at real-time speeds.

YOLO11 is an object detection and multi-task vision model developed by Ultralytics, released in September 2024 under the AGPL-3.0 license. It is the latest generation in the Ultralytics YOLO series and supports object detection, instance segmentation, image classification, pose estimation, and oriented bounding box detection within a single unified framework. YOLO11 introduces architectural refinements that improve accuracy while reducing parameter count compared to YOLOv8 at equivalent model sizes.YOLO11 is available in five model sizes from Nano to Extra Large and is deployable through the Ultralytics Python package, Roboflow Inference, and export formats including ONNX, TensorRT, and CoreML. It supports fine-tuning on custom datasets through the standard Ultralytics training API.

YOLOv9 is a real-time object detection model developed by Chien-Yao Wang and Hong-Yuan Mark Liao at Academia Sinica, released in February 2024 under the GPL-3.0 license. It introduces Programmable Gradient Information (PGI), a mechanism that preserves complete input information through auxiliary reversible branches during training to address information loss in deep network layers. It also introduces the Generalized Efficient Layer Aggregation Network (GELAN), which achieves better parameter utilization compared to prior CSP-based designs.YOLOv9-C achieves 53.0% AP on COCO with 42% fewer parameters and 21% less computation than YOLOv8-C at comparable accuracy. YOLOv9-E achieves 55.6% AP. The model is deployable through Roboflow Inference and supports fine-tuning via the standard training pipeline in the official repository.

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.

YOLOE (YOLO with Everything) is an open-vocabulary object detection and segmentation model developed by THU-MIG at Tsinghua University, released in March 2025 under the AGPL-3.0 license. It extends the YOLO architecture to support open-vocabulary detection through text and visual prompts, enabling the model to detect arbitrary object categories beyond a fixed training set without retraining. The design integrates prompt encoding directly into the YOLO framework while preserving real-time inference speed.YOLOE is evaluated on COCO and LVIS benchmarks and supports both closed-set and open-vocabulary detection modes. It is built on the Ultralytics codebase and maintains compatibility with standard YOLO training and export workflows. YOLOE is suited for applications requiring flexible, prompt-driven object detection where the target object vocabulary may change at inference time.

Mask R-CNN is an instance segmentation model developed by Facebook AI Research (Meta), released in October 2017. It extends Faster R-CNN by adding a parallel branch that predicts binary segmentation masks for each detected object, independent of the classification and bounding box regression branches. A key contribution is RoIAlign, which replaces RoIPool with bilinear interpolation to preserve spatial correspondence between features and input pixels, significantly improving mask quality.Mask R-CNN achieves strong performance on the COCO instance segmentation benchmark and supports keypoint detection as an additional output head. It remains a foundational architecture in instance segmentation and is available through Meta's Detectron2 framework. The model is most appropriate for tasks requiring pixel-level object delineation, such as medical imaging, autonomous driving, and industrial inspection.