Implementing a Compression Technique on the Progressive Contextual Excitation Network for Smart Farming Applications.

The utilization of computer vision in smart farming is becoming a trend in constructing an agricultural automation scheme. Deep learning (DL) is famous for the accurate approach to addressing the tasks in computer vision, such as object detection and image classification. The superiority of the deep learning model on the smart farming application, called Progressive Contextual Excitation Network (PCENet), has also been studied in our recent study to classify cocoa bean images. However, the assessment of the computational time on the PCENet model shows that the original model is only 0.101s or 9.9 FPS on the Jetson Nano as the edge platform. Therefore, this research demonstrates the compression technique to accelerate the PCENet model using pruning filters. From our experiment, we can accelerate the current model and achieve 16.7 FPS assessed in the Jetson Nano. Moreover, the accuracy of the compressed model can be maintained at 86.1%, while the original model is 86.8%. In addition, our approach is more accurate than ResNet18 as the state-of-the-art only reaches 82.7%. The assessment using the corn leaf disease dataset indicates that the compressed model can achieve an accuracy of 97.5%, while the accuracy of the original PCENet is 97.7%.