Sep 20, 2026J/K move · Enter open · S save
Michael Abalo, Jameson Brennan, Hossein Moradi Rekabdarkolaee
Business Analytics, Economics, and Information System Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio · Animal Science Department South Dakota State University West River Research and Extension Center Rapid City, South Dakota
Infectious bovine pinkeye is a contagious ocular disease that adversely affects cattle health, welfare, and agricultural productivity. Conventional diagnosis relies primarily on clinical observation, which can be subjective, time-consuming, and difficult to implement efficiently in large herds or remote settings. This study evaluated and compared You Only Look Once (YOLO) v11 and YOLOv26 for automated bovine pinkeye classification and investigated the effects of class-balancing strategies on model performance. Five variants (n, s, m, l, and x) of each architecture were trained and evaluated using the original imbalanced dataset, Random Minority Oversampling (RMO), and an adapted Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE). Both YOLOv11 and YOLOv26 demonstrated strong classification performance, although the effects of class balancing varied across model variants. For YOLOv11, RMO-s achieved an accuracy of 0.99, a macro F1-score of 0.98, and a true positive rate (TPR) of 1.00, with no false-negative classifications. RMO-m also achieved a TPR of 1.00 with no false negatives. For YOLOv26, the original l, RMO-m, and RMO-l variants each achieved an accuracy of 0.99 and a macro F1-score of 0.98, with RMO-l attaining a TPR of 1.00 and no false negatives. Overall, RMO generally provided greater improvements in minority-class detection than adapted SMOTE, whereas the strong performance of the original YOLOv26-l demonstrates that oversampling was not necessary for all model variants. These findings demonstrate the potential of YOLOv11 and YOLOv26 for automated detection of bovine pinkeye and support further evaluation for livestock health monitoring.