This paper seeks to evaluate the performance of the state of the art object classification algorithms for the purpose of cyclist detection using the Tsinghua–Daimler Cyclist Benchmark. This model focuses on detecting cyclists on the road for its use in development of autonomous road vehicles and advanced driver-assistance systems for hybrid vehicles. The Tiny YOLO v2 algorithm is used here and requires less computational resources and higher real-time performance than the YOLO method, which is extremely desirable for the convenience of such autonomous vehicles. The model has been trained using the training images in the mentioned benchmark and has been tested for the test images available for the same. The average IoU for all the truth objects is calculated and the precision-recall graph for different thresholds was plotted. © 2020, Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.