CADP: Connection-Aware DenseNet Pruning for lightweight plant disease classification.

Abstract

Plant diseases threaten global agriculture, and deep learning-based disease recognition has become crucial for addressing this challenge. While DenseNet excels in plant disease classification due to its dense connectivity, its large size limits deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. This paper proposes Connection-Aware DenseNet Pruning (CADP), achieving efficient compression through three collaborative modules. First, the EdgePrune module explicitly models inter-channel feature flows via an edge weight network, using dual-channel importance scoring that fuses activation correlation and gradient information to remove redundant connections while preserving critical propagation paths. Second, connection-guided CP decomposition leverages EdgePrune's importance information, adaptively assigning differentiated ranks through the Connection Importance Index (CII) to balance preservation of critical layers with deep compression of secondary layers. Third, dual-stream knowledge distillation integrates throughout post-pruning and post-decomposition fine-tuning, combining output-level soft labels and intermediate spatial attention transfer to recover compression losses. CADP achieves 88% parameter reduction and 89% computational savings on DenseNet-121, maintaining 99.67% and 99.66% accuracy on PlantVillage and RiceLeaf datasets, achieving competitive accuracy with significantly fewer parameters. This provides a promising approach for resource-constrained deployment with potential generalizability and practical value.

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物画像から病害状態を推定する分類モデルの軽量化手法を開発し、PlantVillageおよびRiceLeafで性能を評価しているため、病害フェノタイピング手法が中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper uses two publicly available plant image datasets (PlantVillage and Rice Leaf Disease) hosted on Mendeley Data, explicitly linked in the Data Availability statement. No author analysis code, models, or checkpoints are shared.