Multi-objective hybrid knowledge distillation for efficient deep learning in smart agriculture

Deploying deep learning models on resource-constrained edge devices remains a major challenge in smart agriculture due to the trade-off between computational efficiency and recognition accuracy. To address this challenge, this study proposes a hybrid knowledge distillation framework for developing a lightweight yet high-performance convolutional neural network. The proposed approach designs a customized student model that combines inverted residual blocks with dense connectivity and trains it under the guidance of a ResNet18 teacher network using a multi-objective strategy that integrates hard-label supervision, feature-level distillation, response-level distillation, and self-distillation. Experiments are conducted on a rice seed variety identification dataset containing nine varieties and further extended to four plant leaf disease datasets, including rice, potato, coffee, and corn, to evaluate generalization capability. On the rice seed variety classification task, the distilled student model achieves an accuracy of 98.56%, which is only 0.09% lower than the teacher model (98.65%), while requiring only 0.68 GFLOPs and approximately 1.07 million parameters. This corresponds to a reduction of about 2.7 times in computational cost and more than 10 times in model size compared with the ResNet18 teacher model. In addition, compared with representative pretrained models, the proposed student reduces the number of parameters by more than 6 times relative to DenseNet121 and by over 80 times compared with the Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture, while maintaining comparable or superior classification accuracy. Consistent performance gains across multiple plant leaf disease datasets further demonstrate the robustness, efficiency, and strong deployment potential of the proposed framework for hardware-limited smart agriculture systems.