Object Detection in Computer Vision: A Comprehensive Review of Algorithms, Datasets, and Evaluation Techniques

Object detection has evolved dramatically over three decades, transitioning from handcrafted features to deep learning, transformers, and now large language models. This paper provides a comprehensive systematic review of this evolution, covering traditional methods (SIFT, HOG, Viola-Jones), CNN-based single- and two-stage detectors (R-CNN family, YOLO v1-v12, SSD), transformer-based architectures (DETR, ViT, Swin), and emerging LLM-driven approaches (GPT-4V, Grounding DINO, YOLO-World). We benchmark and compare these methods using key metrics-mAP, IoU, FPS-and analyze over 50 datasets across generic, autonomous driving, medical, remote sensing, and agricultural domains. Our critical synthesis identifies persistent research gaps: lightweight edge deployment, sensor fusion for real-time systems, bias and fairness in AI, and multimodal vision-language integration. By consolidating three decades of progress and outlining future challenges, this survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to develop accurate, efficient, and reliable object detection systems.