dronefreak/exdark-yolov8s

YOLOv8s Finetuned on ExDark

Fine-tuned YOLOv8s 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.

---

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-yolov8s",
    filename="best.pt"
)

model = YOLO(weights)

Run Inference

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

results[0].show()

---

Performance

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

Metric	Score (%)
mAP@50	73.01
mAP@50-95	45.85
Precision	78.26
Recall	65.13
F1 Score	71.1
Parameters	11.2M
FLOPs	28.6B (at 640 px)

---

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.

Model	mAP@50	mAP@50-95	Precision	Recall
RF-DETR Small	88.98	61.67	83.07	81.89
RF-DETR Medium	88.64	62.55	86.6	79.46
RF-DETR Nano	85.27	58.01	85.18	74.67
YOLO26l	77.51	50.88	80.71	70.72
YOLO26m	76.54	50.02	82.29	68.83
YOLOv8x	75.4	48.39	81.53	65.86
YOLOv8l	75.26	48.48	81.44	67.58
YOLOv8m	74.69	48.05	78.4	69.17
YOLO11x	74.41	48.98	81.87	67.05
YOLOv9m	74.17	47.38	76.27	67.94
YOLO26s	74.0	48.32	79.11	65.59
YOLO11l	73.44	47.56	78.57	67.09
YOLO11s	73.35	46.8	77.93	66.38
YOLO11m	73.17	47.16	74.83	67.23
YOLOv8s	73.01	45.85	78.26	65.13
YOLO26n	72.7	46.27	81.0	62.67
YOLOv8n	71.29	44.78	78.25	62.76
YOLO11n	70.36	44.72	76.18	61.15

---

Per-Class Performance

Class	mAP@50	mAP@50-95
Bicycle	78.66	53.59
Boat	78.23	41.02
Bottle	62.26	39.43
Bus	82.95	63.11
Car	80.2	54.86
Cat	75.24	45.63
Chair	64.4	35.9
Cup	70.4	44.24
Dog	69.53	46.58
Motorbike	79.4	48.47
People	76.12	42.0
Table	58.74	35.42

---

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

---

Training Configuration

Setting	Value
Dataset	ExDark
Framework	Ultralytics YOLO
Training Toolkit	DetectionBench
Epochs (configured max)	500
Epochs (actually trained)	220
Early Stopping Patience	100
Batch Size	32
Image Size	640
Optimizer	auto
Initial Learning Rate	0.001
Seed	0

---

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_yolov8s_showcase.jpg
README.md

---

Related Resources

• ExDark 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: 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.

---

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}
}