# Real-Time Beach Litter Detection and Counting: A Comparative Analysis of RT-DETR Model Variants Source: [Real-Time Beach Litter Detection and Counting: A Comparative Analysis of RT-DETR Model Variants]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-26T05:27:47.170Z Authors: Miftahul Huda, Arsyiah Azahra, Putri Maulida Chairani, Dimas Rizky Ramadhani, Nabila Azhari, Ade Lailani Published: 2025-08-18T17:10:04.000Z ## Abstract Coastal pollution is a pressing global environmental issue, necessitating scalable and automated solutions for monitoring and management. This study investigates the efficacy of the Real-Time Detection Transformer (RT-DETR), a state-of-the-art, end-to-end object detection model, for the automated detection and counting of beach litter. A rigorous comparative analysis is conducted between two model variants, RT-DETR-Large (RT-DETR-L) and RT-DETR-Extra-Large (RT-DETR-X), trained on a publicly available dataset of coastal debris. The evaluation reveals that the RT-DETR-X model achieves marginally superior accuracy, with a mean Average Precision at 50\\% IoU (mAP@50) of 0.816 and a mAP@50-95 of 0.612, compared to the RT-DETR-L model's 0.810 and 0.606, respectively. However, this minor performance gain is realized at a significant computational cost; the RT-DETR-L model demonstrates a substantially faster inference time of 20.1 ms versus 34.5 ms for the RT-DETR-X. The findings suggest that the RT-DETR-L model offers a more practical and efficient solution for real-time, in-field deployment due to its superior balance of processing speed and detection accuracy. This research provides valuable insights into the application of advanced Transformer-based detectors for environmental conservation, highlighting the critical trade-offs between model complexity and operational viability. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()