What Is YOLO?

Have you ever used a smartphone camera that can automatically detect faces or recognize objects like cars or animals? One of the technologies behind this capability is called YOLO, an acronym for You Only Look Once. It's a deep learning-based object recognition algorithm that works incredibly efficiently and quickly.

As the name suggests, YOLO only needs to "look" at an image once to detect and classify objects within it. Unlike traditional methods that scan small sections of an image repeatedly, YOLO processes the entire image in a single computation, then divides the image into grids and predicts the position and type of objects within those grids.

Imagine a camera recording traffic at an intersection. YOLO can be used to detect how many cars, motorcycles, or pedestrians are passing by in just milliseconds. Due to its speed, this algorithm is well-suited for use in real-time systems such as autonomous cars, drones, patrol robots, or security surveillance systems.

Although the underlying algorithm involves artificial neural networks and millions of parameters trained on thousands of images, users don't need to understand all the complex details. Frameworks like Darknet and Python implementations have made it easy for anyone to try and test YOLO on their own images or videos.