YOLO (You Only Look Once) is a real-time object detection architecture known for its single regression problem approach, in contrast to two-stage detectors like Faster R-CNN.
It divides images into a grid for predicting bounding boxes and class probabilities, offering faster inference with a slight decrease in accuracy compared to traditional detectors.
YOLO has evolved through various versions, maintaining core components such as the backbone for feature extraction, the neck for feature aggregation, and the head for final predictions.
Despite its benefits in speed and real-time applications, YOLO has limitations that include a compromise on accuracy compared to two-stage detectors.