Comparative analysis of previous YOLO detectors and YOLOv26s for real-time weapon detection in video surveillance

Real-time weapon detection in video surveillance is a critical capability for artificial intelligence assisted security systems, particularly in scenarios constrained by low latency, limited computational resources, and strict power efficiency requirements typical of edge artificial intelligence deployments. This work presents a comparative analysis of lightweight YOLO based object detectors, namely YOLOv8s, YOLOv9s, YOLOv10s, and YOLOv11s, vs. the recently introduced YOLOv26s model. In contrast to conventional benchmarking studies, this work extends the evaluation to real-world edge deployment conditions using an NVIDIA Jetson Nano device, explicitly measuring end-to-end latency, including preprocessing, inference, and post-processing stages. While earlier YOLO variants primarily relied on convolutional neural network architectures and intermediate explorations such as attention centered designs aimed to improve detection accuracy, YOLOv26 represents a paradigm shift by being designed from the ground up for low power edge devices, emphasizing architectural simplicity and deployment efficiency. To ensure a fair and reproducible evaluation, all models are trained on the same weapon detection dataset under a unified experimental protocol using small scale variants.The experimental results reveal that, despite exhibiting comparable inference times, different models show significantly different real-time performance due to variations in post-processing complexity. Specifically, models such as YOLOv8s, YOLOv9s, and YOLOv11s incur a substantial post-processing overhead, whereas YOLOv10s and YOLOv26s produce compact output representations that drastically reduce post-processing cost.This leads to a clear separation in deployment behavior, where end-to-end latency is reduced from approximately 300 ms to 125–130 ms, effectively doubling the achievable frame rate on embedded hardware. Rather than proposing a universal ranking, the study analyzes the trade offs introduced by architectural evolution and optimization strategies, providing technical criteria to support model selection under resource constrained deployment scenarios and demonstrating that post-processing efficiency, rather than inference speed alone, is the dominant factor in real-time edge performance.