The fotonet Model Family
fotonet ships one architecture. The fotonete model is a 1.72M-parameter NMS-free detector for 80 COCO classes — small enough to run on everyday GPUs and edge devices, and fast enough for live video without giving up box quality.
fotonete
fotonete is the supported model ID. It is a lightweight NMS-free object
detector designed for constrained hardware and real-time inference: 1.72M parameters,
5.42 GFLOPs at 640×640, and no post-processing stage beyond a threshold and a cap.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Model ID | fotonete |
| Input size | 640 × 640 |
| Classes | 80 COCO classes |
| Training parameters | 1,723,672 |
| Deployment parameters | 1,698,564 |
| Compute | 5.42 GFLOPs @ 640 |
| Output shape | [B, 8400, 84] |
| Feature strides | 8 / 16 / 32 |
| Regression | DFL, reg_max 12 |
| Post-processing | NMS-free (one-to-one head) |
| Checkpoint format | PyTorch .pt |
| License | Apache-2.0 |
Measured locally on the project's own test bench. Accuracy numbers are on the benchmarks page, with full methodology.
Loading a model
Fotonet("fotonete") resolves the verified release checkpoint for you,
downloading it once and caching it locally. There is nothing to install by hand and no
weights in the Git repository.
from fotonet import Fotonet
model = Fotonet("fotonete")
results = model.predict("street.jpg", conf=0.25, imgsz=640)
for det in results[0].boxes:
print(det.cls, det.conf, det.xyxy)Two environment variables override resolution when you need to:
FOTONETE_MODEL_PATH— use a specific local checkpoint file.FOTONETE_CACHE_DIR— change where downloaded weights are cached.
How it compares
Accuracy is the honest trade-off in this project. fotonet is built for speed and footprint first: at 1.72M parameters it is roughly a third the size of the peers it is measured against, and it runs NMS-free. It does not out-accuracy larger models today, and the benchmark page says so plainly rather than hiding it.
Measured benchmarks
Latency, VRAM, GFLOPs and COCO mAP against YOLO26n and D-FINE N, with full methodology.
DesignWhy NMS-free
One-to-one assignment, dual-branch training, and the all-dense graph behind the 1.72M count.
DeployExport & run anywhere
ONNX, fp16 ONNX for the browser, TorchScript, TensorRT and calibrated INT8.