From DETR to RF-DETR: The Evolution of End-to-End Object Detection
TL;DR Object detection has shifted from heavy, hand-engineered pipelines based on anchors and heuristics to end to end transformer architectures that learn object localization and classification jointly. This progression (from DETR 2020 to RF-DETR 2025) has reduced post-processing, improved training stability, and brought real-time inference within reach. DETR: End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers (2020) DEtection TRansformer (DETR) introduced a simple yet novel idea: formulate object detection as a direct set prediction problem solved with transformers....