Analysis of YOLOv26 Variants (Nano to Extra-Large) for Real-Time Weapon Detection in Video Surveillance

Abstract

Real-time weapon detection in video surveillance systems is a critical requirement for proactive security applications, particularly under the computational and latency constraints imposed by edge artificial intelligence deployments. While the YOLO family of object detectors has undergone continuous architectural evolution, the recently introduced YOLOv26 represents a significant redesign aimed at improving efficiency, stability, and deployment suitability across a wide range of hardware platforms. This work presents a comprehensive and homogeneous experimental evaluation of the full YOLOv26 model family, ranging from nano (YOLOv26n) to extra-large (YOLOv26x) variants, for real-time weapon detection in surveillance imagery. All models are trained and evaluated under identical conditions using a dataset that explicitly includes visually similar non-weapon objects as hard negatives, enabling a realistic assessment of false positives and false negatives in safety critical scenarios. The analysis encompasses training and validation dynamics, precision, recall evolution, mean Average Precision (mAP) at multiple IoU thresholds, class-wise confusion matrices, and inference latency. Results show that performance improves consistently from smaller to medium sized models, with YOLOv26m achieving the most balanced trade off between detection accuracy, robustness, and computational cost. Larger variants provide marginal accuracy gains at significantly higher complexity, revealing diminishing returns for edge oriented deployments. Overall, the findings demonstrate that the YOLOv26 architecture offers a scalable and mature detection framework, where model selection can be guided by explicit operational criteria rather than raw accuracy alone. This study establishes a strong baseline for future work on real world edge deployment, multi camera surveillance systems, and hardware aware optimization of next generation YOLO detectors.