description: Explore Meituan YOLOv6, a state-of-the-art object detection model striking a balance between speed and accuracy. Dive into features, pre-trained models, and Python usage.
[Meituan](https://about.meituan.com/) YOLOv6 is a cutting-edge object detector that offers remarkable balance between speed and accuracy, making it a popular choice for real-time applications. This model introduces several notable enhancements on its architecture and training scheme, including the implementation of a Bi-directional Concatenation (BiC) module, an anchor-aided training (AAT) strategy, and an improved backbone and neck design for state-of-the-art accuracy on the COCO dataset.
**Overview of YOLOv6.** Model architecture diagram showing the redesigned network components and training strategies that have led to significant performance improvements. (a) The neck of YOLOv6 (N and S are shown). Note for M/L, RepBlocks is replaced with CSPStackRep. (b) The
structure of a BiC module. (c) A SimCSPSPPF block. ([source](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.05586.pdf)).
### Key Features
- **Bi-directional Concatenation (BiC) Module:** YOLOv6 introduces a BiC module in the neck of the detector, enhancing localization signals and delivering performance gains with negligible speed degradation.
- **Anchor-Aided Training (AAT) Strategy:** This model proposes AAT to enjoy the benefits of both anchor-based and anchor-free paradigms without compromising inference efficiency.
- **Enhanced Backbone and Neck Design:** By deepening YOLOv6 to include another stage in the backbone and neck, this model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the COCO dataset at high-resolution input.
- **Self-Distillation Strategy:** A new self-distillation strategy is implemented to boost the performance of smaller models of YOLOv6, enhancing the auxiliary regression branch during training and removing it at inference to avoid a marked speed decline.
## Pre-trained Models
YOLOv6 provides various pre-trained models with different scales:
- YOLOv6-N: 37.5% AP on COCO val2017 at 1187 FPS with NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPU.
- YOLOv6-S: 45.0% AP at 484 FPS.
- YOLOv6-M: 50.0% AP at 226 FPS.
- YOLOv6-L: 52.8% AP at 116 FPS.
- YOLOv6-L6: State-of-the-art accuracy in real-time.
YOLOv6 also provides quantized models for different precisions and models optimized for mobile platforms.
## Usage
### Python API
```python
from ultralytics import YOLO
model = YOLO("yolov6n.yaml") # build new model from scratch
model.info() # display model information
model.predict("path/to/image.jpg") # predict
```
### Supported Tasks
| Model Type | Pre-trained Weights | Tasks Supported |
The original YOLOv6 paper can be found on [arXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.05586). The authors have made their work publicly available, and the codebase can be accessed on [GitHub](https://github.com/meituan/YOLOv6). We appreciate their efforts in advancing the field and making their work accessible to the broader community.
