Voyager v1.5.3 dropped, and Ultralytics YOLO26 support is the big headline here. If you’ve been following Ultralytics’ releases, you’ll know Ultralytics YOLO26 is specifically engineered for edge devices like Axelera’s Metis hardware.
Why Ultralytics YOLO26 matters for your projects:
The architecture is designed end-to-end, which means no more NMS (non-maximum suppression) post-processing. That translates to simpler deployment and genuinely faster inference. It talks about up to 43% speed improvements on CPUs compared to previous versions. For anyone running projects on Orange Pi, Raspberry Pi, or similar setups, that’s a nice boost.
Small object detection also gets a nice bump thanks to ProgLoss and STAL improvements. If you’re working on anything that needs to catch smaller details (maybe retail analytics, inspection systems, drone footage analysis), this should be super interesting.
Ultralytics YOLO26 comes in n/s/m/l flavours across all the usual tasks: detection, segmentation, pose estimation, oriented bounding boxes, and classification. Good options for the speed vs. accuracy tradeoff based on your hardware and use case.
Bug fixes and stability improvements:
Beyond Ultralytics YOLO26, this release cleans up several issues from v1.5.2. Resource leaks in GStreamer and AxInferenceNet pipelines are fixed, segmentation faults when recreating pipelines with trackers are sorted, and there’s better performance for cascaded pipelines with secondary models.
If you’ve got systems with multiple Metis devices, there’s also a deadlock fix for setups with more than eight of them.
Get it now:
Head over to the usual spots to grab v1.5.3. If you’re already running projects on earlier versions, the stability fixes alone make this a welcome update.
