Plant classification in the wild: Energy evaluation for deep learning models

Having a system that can take an image of a natural scene and accurately classify the plants in it is of undeniable importance. However, the complexities of dealing with natural scene images and the vast diversity of plants in the wild make designing such a classifier a challenging task. Deep Learning (DL) lends itself as viable solution to tackle such complex problem. However, advanced in DL architectures and software (including DL frameworks) come with a high cost in terms of energy consumption especially when employing Graphics Processing Units (GPU). As data expands rapidly, the need to create energy-aware models increases in order to reduce energy consumption and move towards “Greener AI”. Since the problem of designing energy-aware architectures for plant classification has not been studied significantly in the literature, our work comes to start bridging this gap by focusing not only on the models’ performance, but also on their energy usage on both CPU and GPU platforms. We consider different state-of-the-art Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) architectures and train them on two famous challenging plants datasets: iNaturalist and Herbarium. Our experiments are meant to highlight the trade-off between accuracy and energy consumption. For examples, the results show that while GPU-bound models can be about 40% faster in terms of training time than simple models running on CPU, the latter’s energy consumption is only two thirds of the former. We hope that such findings will encourage the community to reduce its reliance on accuracy measures to compare different architectures and start taking other factors into account such as power consumption, simplicity, etc.