
Jinxian TAO, Xiaoli LI, Jingfei ZHANG, Muhammad SHOAIB, Muhammad Adnan ISLAM, Ibrar AHMAD, Yong HE, Sitan YE, Yujie WANG, Binhui LIAO, Mostafa GOUDA. Improving RGB image recognition in the YOLO11n algorithm for accurate detection of tea plant diseases[J]. Journal of Zhejiang University Science B, 2026, 27(5): 482-498.
@article{title="Improving RGB image recognition in the YOLO11n algorithm for accurate detection of tea plant diseases",
author="Jinxian TAO, Xiaoli LI, Jingfei ZHANG, Muhammad SHOAIB, Muhammad Adnan ISLAM, Ibrar AHMAD, Yong HE, Sitan YE, Yujie WANG, Binhui LIAO, Mostafa GOUDA",
journal="Journal of Zhejiang University Science B",
volume="27",
number="5",
pages="482-498",
year="2026",
publisher="Zhejiang University Press & Springer",
doi="10.1631/jzus.B2500693"
}
%0 Journal Article
%T Improving RGB image recognition in the YOLO11n algorithm for accurate detection of tea plant diseases
%A Jinxian TAO
%A Xiaoli LI
%A Jingfei ZHANG
%A Muhammad SHOAIB
%A Muhammad Adnan ISLAM
%A Ibrar AHMAD
%A Yong HE
%A Sitan YE
%A Yujie WANG
%A Binhui LIAO
%A Mostafa GOUDA
%J Journal of Zhejiang University SCIENCE B
%V 27
%N 5
%P 482-498
%@ 1673-1581
%D 2026
%I Zhejiang University Press & Springer
%DOI 10.1631/jzus.B2500693
TY - JOUR
T1 - Improving RGB image recognition in the YOLO11n algorithm for accurate detection of tea plant diseases
A1 - Jinxian TAO
A1 - Xiaoli LI
A1 - Jingfei ZHANG
A1 - Muhammad SHOAIB
A1 - Muhammad Adnan ISLAM
A1 - Ibrar AHMAD
A1 - Yong HE
A1 - Sitan YE
A1 - Yujie WANG
A1 - Binhui LIAO
A1 - Mostafa GOUDA
J0 - Journal of Zhejiang University Science B
VL - 27
IS - 5
SP - 482
EP - 498
%@ 1673-1581
Y1 - 2026
PB - Zhejiang University Press & Springer
ER -
DOI - 10.1631/jzus.B2500693
Abstract: Tea diseases, including brown and gray blight, result in significant yield and quality losses, especially in Longjing tea production. Traditional detection methods are prone to errors, while existing deep learning models often struggle to be robust under natural field conditions. To address these challenges, an improved lightweight detection model, asymmetric multi-level (AML) mechanism, dynamic snake convolution (DSC), and scalable intersection over union (SIoU) loss function-You Only Look Once (YOLO) (ADS-YOLO), was developed and validated. In the method, a dataset comprising 5694 smartphone-captured images of tea leaves was established under natural lighting. Enhancements were implemented in the YOLO11n baseline algorithm through incorporation of the SIoU loss function for better bounding box regression, DSC, which realizes adaptive feature extraction based on the dynamic spatial context, and an AML mechanism, which achieves lightweight feature fusion via adaptive multi-scale design. The results showed that ADS-YOLO achieved a precision of 0.935 and a recall of 0.870, compared to 0.894 and 0.818, respectively, when the baseline YOLO11n was used. Importantly, ADS-YOLO demonstrated a real-time performance of 137.1 frames per second (FPS), coupled with reduced computational costs. ADS-YOLO improved the mean average precision (mAP) at intersection over union threshold of 0.5 (mAP@0.5) by 6.4% compared with YOLOv5n and achieved up to 44.6% higher accuracy than YOLOv7t. In conclusion, ADS-YOLO achieved high accuracy, providing a scalable solution for real-time crop health monitoring and sustainable precision agriculture for tea production.
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CLC number:
On-line Access: 2026-05-15
Received: 2025-10-30
Revision Accepted: 2026-01-28
Crosschecked: 2026-05-15
Cited: 0
Clicked: 1181
Citations: Bibtex RefMan EndNote GB/T7714
Open peer comments: Debate/Discuss/Question/Opinion
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