A Comprehensive Review of YOLO: From YOLOv1 to YOLOv8 and Beyond

Juan Terven, Diana Cordova-Esparza

Published 2023-04-02Version 1

YOLO has become a central real-time object detection system for robotics, driverless cars, and video monitoring applications. We present a comprehensive analysis of YOLO's evolution, examining the innovations and contributions in each iteration from the original YOLO to YOLOv8. We start by describing the standard metrics and postprocessing; then, we discuss the major changes in network architecture and training tricks for each model. Finally, we summarize the essential lessons from YOLO's development and provide a perspective on its future, highlighting potential research directions to enhance real-time object detection systems.