exdark-yolov8l

YOLOv8l Finetuned on ExDark

Fine-tuned YOLOv8l object detector on the ExDark 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.

<p align="center"> <img src="exdark_yolov8l_showcase.jpg" alt="ExDark Detection Demo" width="900"> </p> <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-Object_Detection-blue?style=flat-square" alt="Task"> <img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/Framework-Ultralytics_YOLO-0aa1a7?style=flat-square" alt="Framework"> <img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/Base_Model-YOLOv8l-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/[email protected]%25-success?style=flat-square" alt="mAP@50"> <img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/mAP@50:95-48.48%25-orange?style=flat-square" alt="mAP@50:95"> <img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/Params-46.5M-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>

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Usage

Install Dependencies

pip install ultralytics huggingface_hub

Load Model from Hugging Face

from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download
from ultralytics import YOLO

weights = hf_hub_download(
    repo_id="dronefreak/exdark-yolov8l",
    filename="best.pt"
)

model = YOLO(weights)

Run Inference

results = model.predict(
    source="image.jpg",
    conf=0.25
)

results[0].show()

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Performance

Evaluated on the ExDark test split, using DetectionBench's standard evaluation pipeline (detectionbench-evaluate).

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ExDark Model Zoo

Every model DetectionBench has trained and evaluated on ExDark so far, for full transparency -- see DetectionBench for the smaller, curated comparison set used on the project README.

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Per-Class Performance

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Dataset

This model was trained on ExDark. For the full dataset description, provenance, license, and citation, see the dataset card:

https://huggingface.co/datasets/dronefreak/ExDark

Classes

• Bicycle
• Boat
• Bottle
• Bus
• Car
• Cat
• Chair
• Cup
• Dog
• Motorbike
• People
• Table

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Training Configuration

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Repository Contents

best.pt
results.csv
args.yaml
BoxPR_curve.png
BoxF1_curve.png
BoxP_curve.png
BoxR_curve.png
confusion_matrix.png
confusion_matrix_normalized.png
val_batch0_pred.jpg
exdark_yolov8l_showcase.jpg
README.md

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Related Resources

• ExDark dataset card on Hugging Face
• DetectionBench -- reproducible benchmarks for modern object detectors on real-world datasets

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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.

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Known Limitations

• Severe class imbalance: People accounts for roughly 46% of all annotated boxes while Bus is the rarest class, so per-class accuracy on rare classes is measured on very few test examples and should be read with wide uncertainty.
• Small dataset overall (7,344 images, 734 in the test split, across 12 classes) -- limited training signal for several classes independent of the imbalance above.
• Two-hop provenance: this dataset was converted to YOLO format by a third-party Roboflow export before reaching DetectionBench, not sourced directly from the original per-class-folder release; images are pre-resized to 640x640 by that export.
• The original authors separately request non-commercial use of this dataset (beyond the BSD-3-Clause license text itself) -- this applies to any model trained on it, not only the raw images.

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Citation

If you use this model in your research, please consider citing the dataset and the model architecture:

@article{Exdark,
  title = {Getting to Know Low-light Images with The Exclusively Dark Dataset},
  author = {Loh, Yuen Peng and Chan, Chee Seng},
  journal = {Computer Vision and Image Understanding},
  volume = {178},
  pages = {30-42},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cviu.2018.10.010}
}

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}
}