Abstract:Aiming to address the critical quality control challenge of detecting cracked quail eggs in egg processing, where manual and machine?assisted visual inspection are both inefficient and inaccurate, a high?performance, lightweight online non?destructive detection system was developed based on a comprehensively improved YOLO 11 deep learning architecture. YOLO 11n was selected as the baseline for its favorable balance of speed and accuracy, then systematically optimized for the specific task of identifying subtle cracks on variably patterned quail eggshells through two core phases: network architectural refinement and model compression. In the network refinement phase, the backbone network integrated the C3k2_IDWC module to capture multi?scale textural details and directional contextual information of fine cracks, while the neck network replaced the original SPPF module with SPPF_LSKA (to focus on crack regions via spatial attention) and standard upsampling with EUCB_SCM (to enhance cross?channel information interaction and feature fusion). For model compression, the enhanced network underwent global sparsification via the LAMP pruning algorithm to eliminate redundant parameters, followed by dual knowledge distillation combining BCKD (logit?level guidance) and CWD (feature?level imitation) to transfer knowledge from the high?performance teacher model to the compact student model, yielding YOLO 11?Quail. Experimental results on a dark?field backlighting dataset showed YOLO 11?Quail achieved 94.6% mAP, 95.1% precision and recall, 184.8 f/s inference speed, and only 1.6×10^6 parameters. Deployed on Jetson Nano with a multi?angle tracking algorithm, it delivered an 8.33% false detection rate, 0 missed detection rate, and 68.59 ms latency, satisfying the high?precision real?time demands of industrial production lines.