edgefirst-decoder

YOLO and ModelPack output decoding for edge AI — bounding boxes, segmentation masks and multi-object tracking, without leaving native code.

Part of the EdgeFirst HAL

edgefirst-decoder is one of five Python packages built from the EdgeFirst Hardware Abstraction Layer.

The EdgeFirstAI/hal repository is the home for all of them — source, issue tracker, architecture documentation and release notes.

Installation

pip install edgefirst-decoder

Requires Python 3.8 or newer; edgefirst-tensor and NumPy are installed automatically. Wheels are published for Linux (x86_64, aarch64), macOS (arm64), and Windows (x86_64).

Packages install under the PEP 420 edgefirst.* namespace, so the import is edgefirst.decoder.

Quick start

Describe your model's outputs, then decode inference results into detections:

import numpy as np
from edgefirst.decoder import Decoder, Output, Tensor

decoder = Decoder.new_from_outputs(
    outputs=[Output.detection(shape=[1, 84, 8400])],
    score_threshold=0.25,
    iou_threshold=0.45,
)

# `raw` is what your inference runtime produced. Copy it into a HAL tensor;
# in a real pipeline the runtime writes into the tensor directly instead.
raw = np.zeros((1, 84, 8400), dtype=np.float32)
raw[0, 0:4, 0] = [0.5, 0.5, 0.2, 0.2]  # cx, cy, w, h (normalized)
raw[0, 4, 0] = 0.9  # class 0 score

output = Tensor(raw.shape, "float32")
output.from_numpy(raw)

boxes, scores, classes, masks = decoder.decode([output])
print(np.asarray(boxes), np.asarray(scores), np.asarray(classes))

Boxes come back normalized. NMS runs class-aware by default (unless the model config sets a mode); pass nms=Nms.ClassAgnostic or nms=None to change or bypass it. For validation and mAP runs, pass multi_label=True to emit one box per class above the score threshold instead of one per anchor; decode_tracked ignores it. Multi-label candidates go through the NMS mode unchanged, so nms=Nms.ClassAgnostic suppresses across the classes of one anchor. Multi-label also raises the default pre_nms_top_k from 300 to 30000 (Ultralytics' max_nms); decoder.pre_nms_top_k = 0 removes the cap.

For a quantized model, attach the quantization parameters to the output description so the decoder dequantizes as it reads:

Output.detection(shape=[1, 84, 8400]).with_quantization(scale=0.004, zero_point=-123)

Configurations can also be supplied as a dictionary, or as JSON or YAML, with Decoder(config_dict), Decoder.new_from_json_str() and Decoder.new_from_yaml_str(). Set decoder_version=DecoderVersion.Yolo26 for end-to-end Ultralytics models.

decode() and friends accept a model-output tensor from any edgefirst.* package, not just this one — they cross packages through the capsule protocol, not by type. Value types such as PixelFormat and TensorMemory are accepted from any package too, comparing and hashing equal across packages by value. Importing Tensor from edgefirst.decoder when calling into this package is still good style for readability, not a requirement. See the Interoperability section below for the one thing that does not cross: isinstance against a concrete class.

Segmentation masks

decode() returns masks at prototype resolution as arrays of shape (H, W, C):

• Instance segmentation (YOLO): C == 1, a binary per-instance mask — threshold at 128.
• Semantic segmentation (ModelPack): C == num_classes, per-pixel class scores — take argmax over the last axis.

Multi-object tracking

Tracking lives in the standalone edgefirst-tracker wheel. Decoder.decode_tracked accepts any object with an update method, including edgefirst.tracker.ByteTrack:

from edgefirst.tracker import ByteTrack

tracker = ByteTrack()
boxes, scores, classes, masks, tracks = decoder.decode_tracked(
    tracker, timestamp_ns, outputs
)

Schema inference for Ultralytics exports

A vanilla Ultralytics YOLOv8/11/26 export carries no edgefirst.json, but its own metadata and tensor shapes are enough to derive one. infer_ultralytics_schema reads what your runtime reports and returns a schema you can hand straight to Decoder():

import onnxruntime as ort
from edgefirst.decoder import Decoder, infer_ultralytics_schema

sess = ort.InferenceSession("yolov8n.onnx", providers=["CPUExecutionProvider"])

# Ultralytics ONNX exports are float32 throughout and unquantized. A TFLite
# interpreter reports dtype and quantization per tensor instead; pass those as
# a 4th element on each output: (name, shape, dtype, (scales, zero_points)).
inputs = [(t.name, list(t.shape), "float32") for t in sess.get_inputs()]
outputs = [(t.name, list(t.shape), "float32") for t in sess.get_outputs()]
metadata = dict(sess.get_modelmeta().custom_metadata_map)

inferred = infer_ultralytics_schema("onnx", inputs, outputs, metadata)
print(inferred.description)  # "Ultralytics YOLOv8/11 detect, 80 classes"

decoder = Decoder(inferred.schema, score_threshold=0.25, iou_threshold=0.45)

boxes, scores, classes, masks = decoder.decode(model_outputs)
print(inferred.labels[classes[0]])  # class name for the first detection

The result is a named tuple, so schema, labels, description = inferred works too — but two of the three fields are strings, and naming them is cheaper than remembering the order.

source decides the box convention: Ultralytics ONNX exports report pixel-space coordinates, TFLite exports report [0, 1], and a CoreML export (no-NMS) resolves pixel-space too, the same as ONNX. A nms=True CoreML export produces Apple's own NMS-pipeline artifact instead, which is refused rather than resolved. "other" is accepted but refused by inference rather than defaulted — that convention follows the exporter, is not derivable from shapes, and guessing it scales every box by the input size. Supported dtype strings are the tensor dtype names "i8", "u8", "i16", "u16", "i32", "u32", "f16" and "f32"; the older "int8", "uint8", "int16", "uint16", "int32", "uint32", "float16" and "float32" are still accepted. The schema reports dtypes with the tensor names.

schema is a plain dict, ready for Decoder(schema) — there is no JSON string to parse back. labels is the class names in index order, which is what maps decode()'s class indices back to names.

Shapes must be concrete. A model exported with dynamic=True reports a symbolic axis ('batch' from ONNX, -1 from TFLite); those are refused with a ValueError naming the tensor and axis, because the layout rules need real sizes.

The schema pins the NMS mode and leaves the thresholds to you. Ultralytics runs NMS class-aware (agnostic=False), so an inferred pre-NMS schema says so explicitly. Passing nms= still overrides. Thresholds are not inferable, and Decoder's defaults (score_threshold=0.1, iou_threshold=0.7) are not Ultralytics' (0.25/0.45) — pass them as shown above. YOLO26 end-to-end exports apply NMS in-graph and carry no mode at all.

ValueError is raised for anything that is not a recognizable Ultralytics export — missing or unparsable metadata, an unsupported task (only detect and segment; pose, OBB and classify are refused), or a class count that does not fit the output width. Metadata and shapes are cross-checked against each other, so a disagreement is reported rather than resolved by preference.

What this package provides

Interoperability

decode() / decode_proto() / decode_tracked() accept model-output tensors from any edgefirst.* package, and Decoder / ProtoData instances produced here hand off to edgefirst.image's ImageProcessor the same way. Each extension module registers its own type objects (PyO3 issue #1444 — isinstance across packages is always False, even for two objects wrapping the same Rust type), so acceptance goes through duck-typed capsule protocols instead:

# CORRECT — works regardless of which edgefirst.* package produced obj
if hasattr(obj, "__edgefirst_tensor__"):
    ...

# WRONG — always False for a tensor from a sibling package
if isinstance(obj, edgefirst.image.Tensor):
    ...

edgefirst.decoder.EdgeFirstTensorExportable (re-exported from edgefirst.tensor), EdgeFirstDecoderExportable and EdgeFirstProtoDataExportable are typing.Protocol classes you can annotate a cross-package parameter with. See crates/python-common/INTEROP.md for the full protocol.

Versioning and changelog

All four edgefirst-* packages are versioned and released together with the HAL itself, so a given version number refers to the same source tree in every language. Because of that there is no per-package changelog: release notes for every version live in the single CHANGELOG.md in the hal repository, which follows Keep a Changelog and Semantic Versioning.

Links

• Changelog — release notes for all packages
• Source — the hal monorepo
• Issue tracker
• Package documentation — the underlying Rust crate
• EdgeFirst

License

Apache-2.0