Peer-reviewed publicationComputer Vision20248 min read

Iranian Vehicle Images Dataset for Object Detection Algorithm

A domain-specific dataset of 3,000 Iranian vehicle images and 5,765 manually labeled bounding boxes improved YOLOv8s performance over a COCO-trained baseline.

Authors: Pouria Maleki · Abbas Ramazani · Hassan Khotanlou · Sina Ojaghi
Pouria MalekiJournal of Artificial Intelligence and Data Mining (JAIDM)DOI: 10.22044/jadm.2024.13858.2501Blog updated: 2026-08-14
Iranian Vehicle Images Dataset for Object Detection Algorithm — research article by Pouria Maleki
Key results & takeaways
3,000 Iranian vehicle images with 5,765 manually labeled bounding boxes
91.7% precision and 92.6% mAP@0.5 with domain-specific training
A practical example of why data quality and domain fit can matter as much as model choice

Research visuals & results

1 figure
Vehicle detection on an urban traffic scene in Be’sat Boulevard, Hamedan.
Vehicle detection on an urban traffic scene in Be’sat Boulevard, Hamedan.

Reliable object detection depends heavily on the quality and relevance of training data. In this work, we built a dedicated dataset for Iranian urban traffic instead of relying only on generic international benchmarks.

Why a local vehicle dataset matters

Vehicles seen in Iran have a different distribution of brands, models, viewpoints and urban conditions. A detector trained on a broad dataset can perform well globally while still underperforming in a specific local environment. We therefore collected images from Iranian vehicle marketplaces and traffic scenes, then manually labeled the vehicles.

Dataset at a glance

  • 3,000 images
  • 5,765 bounding boxes
  • Three classes: car, bus and truck
  • Images collected from sources including Divar, Bama and urban traffic scenes
  • Multiple viewpoints and vehicle orientations
  • Train, validation and independent test partitions

YOLOv8s results

The YOLOv8s model trained on the custom dataset achieved 91.7% precision and 92.6% mAP@0.5. Compared with the same architecture using COCO-trained weights as the main reference, the domain-specific training produced a substantial improvement in detection quality.

MetricCustom dataset
Precision91.7%
Recall86.6%
mAP@0.592.6%
mAP@0.5:0.9570.2%

Engineering lesson

The key lesson is simple: better data can be more valuable than a more complicated model. Careful collection, accurate annotation, class analysis and augmentation can make an existing architecture far more useful in a target environment.

Practical pipeline

python
# simplified training concept
from ultralytics import YOLO

model = YOLO("yolov8s.pt")
model.train(
    data="iranian-vehicles.yaml",
    imgsz=800,
    epochs=100,
    lr0=0.01,
)

The dataset is useful for intelligent transportation systems, traffic monitoring and future research on localized vehicle perception.

Related research

Object Detection for Vehicles with Yolo — research by Pouria Maleki
IEEE conference paperDeep Learning
Jan 25, 20249 min readGitHub

Object Detection for Vehicles with Yolo

IEEE SAMI 2024

A seven-class, 29,759-image vehicle benchmark that treats ambulances and fire trucks as dedicated object-detection classes and evaluates real-time detector performance.

29,759 images and 55,925 annotations across seven vehicle classes
Read article