Lightweight CNN Architectures for Real-Time Crop Disease Detection on Low-End Smartphones for Rural Deployment

  • Unique Paper ID: 208558
  • PageNo: 470-474
  • Abstract:
  • Crop disease diagnosis remains a critical bottleneck for smallholder farmers, particularly in rural and semi-urban regions where agricultural extension services are limited and internet connectivity is unreliable. While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved high accuracy in plant disease classification, most existing research prioritizes accuracy alone, using large architectures such as ResNet and VGG that are impractical for deployment on low-end smartphones. This study addresses that gap by evaluating MobileNetV3-Small, EfficientNet-Lite0, and a custom pruned/quantized CNN against a ResNet50 baseline for multi-class crop disease classification using the PlantVillage dataset. Beyond accuracy and F1-score, models are benchmarked using model size, CPU-only inference latency, and memory footprint under conditions representative of budget Android devices with no GPU and offline operation. The best-performing lightweight model is further optimized using post-training quantization, and its accuracy-efficiency trade-off is analyzed before and after compression. The study proposes an accuracy-per-MB and accuracy-per-millisecond framework to compare deployment feasibility across architectures. Since verified experimental measurements were not available during document preparation, numerical results remain to be experimentally determined.

Copyright & License

Copyright © 2026 Authors retain the copyright of this article. This article is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

BibTeX

@article{208558,
        author = {Soham Sushil Parab},
        title = {Lightweight CNN Architectures for Real-Time Crop Disease Detection on Low-End Smartphones for Rural Deployment},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {13},
        number = {no},
        pages = {470-474},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=208558},
        abstract = {Crop disease diagnosis remains a critical bottleneck for smallholder farmers, particularly in rural and semi-urban regions where agricultural extension services are limited and internet connectivity is unreliable. While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved high accuracy in plant disease classification, most existing research prioritizes accuracy alone, using large architectures such as ResNet and VGG that are impractical for deployment on low-end smartphones. This study addresses that gap by evaluating MobileNetV3-Small, EfficientNet-Lite0, and a custom pruned/quantized CNN against a ResNet50 baseline for multi-class crop disease classification using the PlantVillage dataset. Beyond accuracy and F1-score, models are benchmarked using model size, CPU-only inference latency, and memory footprint under conditions representative of budget Android devices with no GPU and offline operation. The best-performing lightweight model is further optimized using post-training quantization, and its accuracy-efficiency trade-off is analyzed before and after compression. The study proposes an accuracy-per-MB and accuracy-per-millisecond framework to compare deployment feasibility across architectures. Since verified experimental measurements were not available during document preparation, numerical results remain to be experimentally determined.},
        keywords = {crop disease detection, convolutional neural networks, lightweight CNNs, edge AI, mobile deployment.},
        month = {September},
        }

Cite This Article

Parab, S. S. (2026). Lightweight CNN Architectures for Real-Time Crop Disease Detection on Low-End Smartphones for Rural Deployment. International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology (IJIRT), 470–474.

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