Yolo

YOLO is an acronym with multiple notable meanings. In popular culture, it stands for You Only Live Once, a motto used to justify taking risks and living life to the fullest. In computer vision, YOLO refers to a family of real-time object detection systems known for speed and simplicity.

You Only Live Once

Originating in the early 2010s, the phrase gained widespread popularity through music culture and social media and is used to encourage seizing opportunities and living boldly. It has been adopted in fashion, advertising, and everyday language, though as informal slang its connotations can vary and it may be seen as promoting impulsivity.

You Only Look Once

YOLO, the object detection system, was introduced in 2016 by Joseph Redmon and colleagues. It frames detection as a single regression problem, predicting bounding boxes and class probabilities directly from full images in one evaluation. This single-shot approach enables real-time performance on standard hardware, making it suitable for applications such as surveillance, robotics, and autonomous systems. Successive versions (YOLOv2, YOLOv3, YOLOv4, etc.) improved accuracy and speed, and numerous forks and adaptations have broadened use cases and deployment options.