Global agricultural productivity is a challenge to plant diseases, generating strong demand for rapid and efficient diagnostic tools for early detection and effective management. For plant disease classification, this study evaluates four deep learning models (EfficientNet B3, GoogLeNet, DenseNet, and VGG16). The models are evaluated based on accuracy, precision, inference latency and computational resource usage on a large dataset covering several crops and disease types while consuming CPU and RAM. However, it's found that EfficientNet B3 has better accuracy and computational efficiency compared with the other models, especially in a resource constrained setting. The rest are DenseNet, GoogLeNet and VGG16, both perform well and in DenseNet, it performs well in both accuracy and resource spent too. VGG16 only gives slightly lower accuracy than ResNet50, but it needs more computational resources. The study shows that EfficientNet B3 is a candidate for real time precision agriculture applications. The findings presented in this research offer valuable guidance about model selection for plant disease detection, enabling the development of scalable, low-cost diagnostic systems that can be used by farmers to reduce crop losses and improve yield quality.
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