YOLO-based deep learning framework for real-time multi-class plant health monitoring in precision agriculture

Real-time, accurate assessment of crop conditions is key to effective decision-making in precision agriculture. This study proposes an enhanced deep-learning framework that jointly investigates YOLOv8 and the newly released YOLOv11 object-detection architectures for multi-class leaf-health monitoring. A curated dataset of 5000 high-resolution images annotated as healthy, stressed, or damaged was collected across diverse species, growth stages, and lighting conditions. An end-to-end training pipeline was developed featuring extensive geometric, colour, cut-out, and mosaic augmentations; transfer-learning from COCO weights; and GPU-accelerated fine-tuning for 50 epochs. To underpin reproducibility, we provide a…