You Only Look Once

You Only Look Once
Original authors	Joseph Redmon, Santosh Divvala, Ross Girshick, Ali Farhadi
Release	2015
Stable release	YOLOv12 / 2025-02-20
Written in	Python
Type	Object detection Convolutional neural network Computer vision
Website	pjreddie.com/darknet/yolo/

Objects detected with OpenCV's Deep Neural Network module by using a YOLOv3 model trained on COCO dataset capable to detect objects of 80 common classes

You Only Look Once (YOLO) is a series of real-time object detection systems based on convolutional neural networks. First introduced by Joseph Redmon et al. in 2015, YOLO has undergone several iterations and improvements, becoming one of the most popular object detection frameworks.

The name "You Only Look Once" refers to the fact that the algorithm requires only one forward propagation pass through the neural network to make predictions, unlike previous region proposal-based techniques like R-CNN that require thousands for a single image.