Mendes, JoãoLima, JoséRodrigues, NunoPereira, Ana I.2025-12-042025-12-042026Mendes, João; Lima, José; Rodrigues, Nuno; Pereira, Ana I. (2026). Automated Preprocessing of Olive Leaf Images for Cultivar Classification Using YOLO11. In 5th International Conference OL2A. Cham: Springer Nature. p. 286–297. ISBN 9783032001368978303200136897830320013751865-09291865-0937http://hdl.handle.net/10198/35171Olive cultivation is a pillar of Mediterranean agriculture, deeply rooted in both tradition and economic importance. This paper presents a novel two-phase methodology for the automated preprocessing of olive leaf images to facilitate accurate cultivar classification. Leveraging the state-of-the-art YOLO11 framework, two models (YOLO11n and YOLO11s) were employed for detection and segmentation tasks. A comprehensive dataset, combining in-situ captured images with publicly available data, was meticulously annotated using both manual and semi-automatic processes. The detection model identifies individual olive leaves, while the segmentation model isolates the leaves by replacing the background with a uniform white, thereby simulating laboratory conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that YOLO11n outperforms YOLO11s in terms of mean Average Precision and F1-score, confirming the feasibility of deploying the system on mobile devices for real-time, in-field classification.engOlive CultivationLeaf DetectionImage SegmentationYOLO11Smart Agricultureconference paper10.1007/978-3-032-00137-5_20