Grow-light smart monitoring system leveraging lightweight deep learning for plant disease classification

This work focuses on a novel lightweight machine learning approach to the task of plant disease classification, posing as a core component of a larger grow-light smart monitoring system. To the extent of our knowledge, this work is the first to implement lightweight convolutional neural network architectures leveraging down-scaled versions of inception blocks, residual connections, and dense residual connections applied without pre-training to the PlantVillage dataset. The novel contributions of this work include the proposal of a smart monitoring framework outline; responsible for detection and classification of ailments via the devised lightweight networks as well as interfacing with LED grow-light fixtures to optimize environmental parameters and lighting control for the growth of plants in a greenhouse system. Lightweight adaptation of dense residual connections achieved the best balance of minimizing model parameters and maximizing performance metrics with accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-scores of 96.75%, 97.62%, 97.59%, and 97.58% respectively, while consisting of only 228,479 model parameters. These results are further compared against various full-scale state-of-the-art model architectures trained on the PlantVillage dataset, of which the proposed down-scaled lightweight models were capable of performing equally to, if not better than many large-scale counterparts with drastically less computational requirements. •Development of lightweight adaptations for modern computer vision architectures.•Maximization of performance retention whilst mitigating computational requirements.•Comparative analysis of proposed lightweight models and their fullscale counterparts.