Plant Disease Identification Using Machine Learning Algorithms on Single-Board Computers in IoT Environments

This paper investigates the usage of machine learning (ML) algorithms on agricultural images with the aim of extracting information regarding the health of plants. More specifically, a custom convolutional neural network is trained on Google Colab using photos of healthy and unhealthy plants. The trained models are evaluated using various single-board computers (SBCs) that demonstrate different essential characteristics. Raspberry Pi 3 and Raspberry Pi 4 are the current mainstream SBCs that use their Central Processing Units (CPUs) for processing and are used for many applications for executing ML algorithms based on popular related libraries such as TensorFlow. NVIDIA Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) have a different rationale and base the execution of ML algorithms on a GPU that uses a different architecture than a CPU. GPUs can also implement high parallelization on the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) cores. Another current approach involves using a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) processing unit carried by the Google Coral Dev TPU Board, which is an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) specialized for accelerating ML algorithms such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) via the usage of TensorFlow Lite. This study experiments with all of the above-mentioned devices and executes custom CNN models with the aim of identifying plant diseases. In this respect, several evaluation metrics are used, including knowledge extraction time, CPU utilization, Random Access Memory (RAM) usage, swap memory, temperature, current milli Amperes (mA), voltage (Volts), and power consumption milli Watts (mW).