Battle of the bots: VLMs (Qwen 3, InternVL-3.5) vs. YOLOv11 + PaddleOCR. Using 2,500 toll booth images of vehicles, the task covers car vs. truck classification and license plate recognition. Evaluation includes accuracy, precision, and Levenshtein distance to determine which pipeline truly owns the road. Who wins?
Maciej Szymkowski holds a PhD in Computer Science. Since April 2025, he has been working at Future Processing as a Senior Machine Learning Engineer. Previously, he was affiliated with Bialystok University of Technology (Faculty of Computer Science, 2018–2026), Warsaw University of Technology (Faculty of Electronics and Information Technology, 2021–2022), and AGH University of Science and Technology in Cracow (Faculty of Physics and Applied Computer Science, 2021–2022). He has also gained experience as a researcher on diverse projects and as a software developer and engineer in multiple companies, including SoftServe, Symmetra, Transition Technologies, and Hemolens Diagnostics. From 2022 to 2024, he worked at the Łukasiewicz Research Network, Poznan Institute of Technology, where he served as Head of the AI Development section. Maciej Szymkowski is the author or co author of more than 45 research papers published in JCR journals, book chapters, and international conference proceedings. His primary research interests lie in computer vision, particularly in medicine and transport, as well as Vision Language Models, Large Language Models, and machine learning algorithms. In his free time, he enjoys expanding his knowledge, taking long walks, reading books, and watching soccer, basketball, and hockey. He is a fan of Legia Warsaw, Real Madrid, the New York Knicks, and the Pittsburgh Penguins.
