The YOLOv8 Edge: Harnessing Custom Datasets for Superior Real-Time Detection

YOLO has become a central real-time object detection system for robotics, driverless cars, and video monitoring applications. Developing a custom object detection solution that can detect specific objects in real-time video streams has the potential to revolutionize various fields and has been the subject of extensive research. Although there have been advances in object detection, there is still a gap in the research for real-time detection of custom objects with high accuracy and speed. This research addresses this gap by training a YOLOv8 detector on a custom dataset of objects and evaluating its performance on real-time video streams which is by far the latest model and thus is faster and more accurate. Our experimental results demonstrate that our custom-trained YOLOv8 detector achieves high accuracy and real-time performance on a custom dataset of objects. The detector achieved an overall mAP50 of 0.864 and a mAP50-95 of 0.758, with individual class results ranging from 0.47 to 0.995. These findings show that custom training data and YOLOv8 are effective in real-time object detection, which has practical applications in various fields. The significance of the results and our contribution lies in demonstrating the effectiveness of custom training data for improving object detection accuracy and speed using YOLO, which has implications for a wide range of real-world applications.