Daily Papers

Ensuring safety in both autonomous driving and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) depends critically on the efficient deployment of traffic sign recognition technology. While current methods show effectiveness, they often compromise between speed and accuracy. To address this issue, we present a novel real-time and efficient road sign detection network, YOLO-TS. This network significantly improves performance by optimizing the receptive fields of multi-scale feature maps to align more closely with the size distribution of traffic signs in various datasets. Moreover, our innovative feature-fusion strategy, leveraging the flexibility of Anchor-Free methods, allows for multi-scale object detection on a high-resolution feature map abundant in contextual information, achieving remarkable enhancements in both accuracy and speed. To mitigate the adverse effects of the grid pattern caused by dilated convolutions on the detection of smaller objects, we have devised a unique module that not only mitigates this grid effect but also widens the receptive field to encompass an extensive range of spatial contextual information, thus boosting the efficiency of information usage. Evaluation on challenging public datasets, TT100K and CCTSDB2021, demonstrates that YOLO-TS surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and speed. The code for our method will be available.

Deep learning has advanced two fundamentally different paradigms for instance segmentation: specialized models optimized through task-specific fine-tuning and generalist foundation models capable of zero-shot segmentation. This work presents a comprehensive comparison between SAM3 (Segment Anything Model, also called SAMv3) operating in zero-shot mode and three variants of Ultralytics YOLO11 (nano, medium, and large) fine-tuned for instance segmentation. The evaluation is conducted on the MinneApple dataset, a dense benchmark comprising 670 orchard images with 28,179 annotated apple instances, enabling rigorous validation of model behavior under high object density and occlusion. Our analysis shows IoU choices can inflate performance gaps by up to 30%. At the appropriate IoU = 0.15 threshold, YOLO models achieve 68.9%, 72.2%, and 71.9% F1, while SAM3 reaches 59.8% in pure zero-shot mode. However, YOLO exhibits steep degradation 48-50 points across IoU ranges whereas SAM3 drops only 4 points, revealing 12 times superior boundary stability of SAM3. This highlights the strength of SAMv3 in mask precision versus specialization in detection completeness of YOLO11. We provide open-source code, evaluation pipelines, and methodological recommendations, contributing to a deeper understanding of when specialized fine-tuned models or generalist foundation models are preferable for dense instance segmentation tasks. This project repository is available on GitHub as https://github.com/Applied-AI-Research-Lab/Segment-Anything-Model-SAM3-Zero-Shot-Segmentation-Against-Fine-Tuned-YOLO-Detectors