YOLOv6 How to Use ? – Best Tutorial Simple

In this article you’ll find everything you need to use YOLOv6: implementation details, understanding of the results and more!

YOLOv6 is the 2022 version of YOLO.

YOLO stands for You Only Look Once. It is a Deep Learning model used for detection on images and videos.

The first version of YOLO was released in 2016. Since then, frequent updates are made with the latest improvements: faster computation, better accuracy.

Here are the results of YOLOv6 compared to other versions on the COCO dataset:

Now, let’s see how to use it !

How to use YOLOv6 ?

The following lines of code work for any Notebook/Colab instance. If you want to run YOLOv6 on a terminal/locally, just remove the first “!” or “%” from each line of code.

To use YOLOv6, we first need to download the Github repository!

To do this, we’ll use the git clone command to download it to our Notebook:

!git clone https://dagshub.com/nirbarazida/YOLOv6

Then, we place ourselves in the folder we just downloaded:

%cd YOLOv6

Next, we have to install all the necessary libraries to use YOLOv6.

Libraries are the following:

• torch
• torchvision
• numpy
• opencv-python
• PyYAML
• scipy
• tqdm
• addict
• tensorboard
• pycocotools
• dvc
• onnx

Fortunately, only one line of code is needed to install all these dependencies:

!pip install -r requirements.txt

We then want to download the weights of the Neural Network.

With the git clone command, we’ve downloaded all the architecture of the Neural Network (layers of the model, functions to train it, use it, evaluate it, …) but to use it, we also need the weights.

In a Neural Network, the weights are the information obtained by the model during training.

You can manually download any version of the weights here and then put the file in the YOLOv6 folder.

Or easily download it with this line of code:

!wget https://github.com/meituan/YOLOv6/releases/download/0.1.0/yolov6n.pt

At the time I’m writing those lines, YOLOv6 has just been released. Updates may occur and the weights may change, as well as the URL of their repository. If the link no longer works, check this Github for the latest version.

One last thing before using the template: upload your image!

Either a single image, or several in a folder (YOLOv6 can handle several images at once).

Feeling lazy ? You can simply upload our test image in one line of code :

!wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tkeldenich/Tutorial_YOLOv6/main/man_cafe.jpg

FINALLY, we can use YOLOv6!

To do this, we’ll call the infer.py file in the tools folder.

The python code in this file will run the detection for us.

We only need to specify a few important parameters, in our case :

• weights we are using: --weights yolov6n.pt
• image on which we want to apply the detection: --source ./man_cafe.jpg

!python tools/infer.py --weights yolov6n.pt --source ./man_cafe.jpg

If you use your own image or folder, just change this last part to ./your_path.

Understand the results

You’ll find the detection output in the folder YOLOv6/runs/inference/exp/

Here is our result :

First of all, we can see that YOLOv6 has a very good detection capacity. It even detects the person right behind our main character.

You can see that it even indicates the confidence with which it detects objects/people. Most obvious objects are detected with a high confidence threshold. But we can see on the left that YOLOv6 detects a bottle. Here the model fails. But it fails with a very low confidence threshold.

It detects with 34% confidence that there is a bottle on the left table. This means that YOLOv6 is not at all sure about this prediction.

Maybe we can simply remove this prediction?

Actually it’s possible when running YOLOv6.

Remember that we have defined some parameters. The mandatory parameters are the weights and the source (image path), but there are also default parameters that you can change to suit your needs.

There are other parameters, for example:

• Confidence threshold: conf-thres (default value: 0.25)
• Intersection over Union threshold: iou-thres (default value: 0.45)

The confidence threshold defines the minimum confidence value at which the detection must be kept.

By default, if a detection has a confidence threshold lower than 25%, it will be deleted.

Let’s change the confidence threshold to 0.35 :

!python tools/infer.py --weights yolov6n.pt --source ./man_cafe.jpg --conf-thres 0.35

Result :

Here we see that the bottle has not been kept.

Use YOLOv6, make assumptions for your project and set the confidence threshold that suits your need 😉

Changing weights

Now you understand a bit more what YOLOv6 is.

Let’s go deeper.

There are different versions of YOLOv6 weights.

We have used a large version of these weights.

The large weights mean three things compared to the other versions:

• Better results (or at least a better understanding of the complexity)
• Slower computation speed
• More memory space used

But what if you have space and time constraints?

Well, ou can use other versions of these weights:

• Small: https://github.com/meituan/YOLOv6/releases/download/0.1.0/yolov6s.pt
• Medium: https://github.com/meituan/YOLOv6/releases/download/0.1.0/yolov6t.pt
• Large: https://github.com/meituan/YOLOv6/releases/download/0.1.0/yolov6n.pt

Again, you can download them manually here and then put them into your folder, or use wget and specify the version you want:

!wget weight_file_path

Depending on the weight version you’ve chosen, you will have :

• Small: yolov6s.pt
• Medium: yolov6t.pt
• Large: yolov6n.pt

To use it, replace weight_file here:

!python tools/infer.py --weights weight_file --source ./man_cafe.jpg

Now you know how to use YOLOv6!

If you want to know more about Computer Vision, feel free to check our category dedicated to this topic.

See you soon in a next post 😉