Low-Power Deep Learning Model for Plant Disease Detection for Smart-Hydroponics Using Knowledge Distillation Techniques

Recent advances in computing allows researchers to propose the automation of hydroponic systems to boost efficiency and reduce manpower demands, hence increasing agricultural produce and profit. A completely automated hydroponic system should be equipped with tools capable of detecting plant diseases in real-time. Despite the availability of deep-learning-based plant disease detection models, the existing models are not designed for an embedded system environment, and the models cannot realistically be deployed on resource-constrained IoT devices such as raspberry pi or a smartphone. Some of the drawbacks of the existing models are the following: high computational resource requirements, high power consumption, dissipates energy rapidly, and occupies large storage space due to large complex structure. Therefore, in this paper, we proposed a low-power deep learning model for plant disease detection using knowledge distillation techniques. The proposed low-power model has a simple network structure of a shallow neural network. The parameters of the model were also reduced by more than 90%. This reduces its computational requirements as well as its power consumption. The proposed low-power model has a maximum power consumption of 6.22 w, which is significantly lower compared to the existing models, and achieved a detection accuracy of 99.4%.