Resource-efficient federated learning over IoAT for rice leaf disease classification

Abstract

Rice is an important staple food in Asia. It is produced and consumed in large quantities. It contributes to 15% of protein intake and 21% of total per capita energy intake in the region, underscoring its important role as a primary global food source. Conversely, rice plants are heavily affected by bacterial, fungal and other microbial diseases, resulting in reduced plant health and crop yields and posing a major challenge for rice farmers. Manual diagnosis of these diseases is particularly problematic in regions with a shortage of agricultural experts. Farmers with insufficient experience sometimes incorrectly identify these diseases by hand. Recent advances in deep learning (DL) models offer a promising solution through automatic image recognition systems that can be very helpful in accurately identifying these diseases. This manuscript presents a resource-efficient federated learning IoAT (Internet of Agriculture Things) approach for rice leaf disease classification. This approach incorporates two key strategies, namely federated transfer learning and feature extraction, and evaluates their performance on various metrics such as accuracy, loss, precision, recall, AUC, and resource-related parameters such as GPU memory consumption, virtual memory, CPU and GPU process utilization. The dataset used in the study includes 5932 images of rice leaf diseases categorized as bacterial leaf blight, blast, brown spot and tungro. The research investigates the application of federated transfer learning and federated feature extraction techniques to classify rice leaf disease images. It performs a comparative analysis of their performance and resource utilization. EfficientNetB3, with an impressive validation accuracy of 99%, is identified as the base model for the federated learning (FL) environment. Furthermore, we implement FL using both transfer learning and feature extraction methods and compare their results on a number of performance and resource related parameters. It is shown that the federated feature extraction approach has lower GPU memory and process utilization compared to the federated transfer learning approach and is thus more resource efficient. Extracting features before model training results in a lightweight model, which is especially beneficial for FL, IoAT devices that require efficient execution on edge devices. Therefore, the proposed approach is presented as a lightweight, privacy-friendly and resource-efficient solution for rice leaf disease classification.