From architectural complexity to minimalist optimization: refining microscopic tea disease detection via Opti-YOLOv11n.

INTRODUCTION: The precise detection of microscopic tea leaf diseases is a prerequisite for sustainable precision agriculture. While recent deep learning advancements often favor architectural complexity, this "complexity bias" frequently introduces computational redundancy-a "complexity tax"-that destabilizes gradient flow and fails to resolve critical resolution bottlenecks for micro-lesion identification. METHODS: We propose Opti-YOLOv11n, a minimalist optimization paradigm prioritizing physical input fidelity and stabilized gradient dynamics. Utilizing a dataset of six pathological categories, our framework employs high-resolution scaling (832×832) combined with a momentum-based SGD optimizer and a cosine annealing schedule to reconstruct essential spatial textures. RESULTS: Opti-YOLOv11n achieved a peak Precision of 98.87% and a Recall of 95.97%, while reducing the parameter count to 2.35 M-a 9.2% decrease relative to the baseline-and maintaining a real-time inference speed of 104.7 FPS on edge-simulated hardware. DISCUSSION: Statistical verification via 5-fold cross-validation confirms superior generalization stability. These results substantiate that strategic structural pruning and physical input scaling provide a more robust technical benchmark for autonomous plant protection than the adoption of excessive architectural depth.