CoFANN: A collaborative framework for accelerating DNN inference in drone-based agricultural monitoring systems

Abstract

Plant leaf diseases pose a major threat to global agricultural productivity, causing substantial crop losses annually. While drone-based monitoring systems equipped with deep neural networks (DNNs) offer a promising solution for large-scale disease detection, their deployment is hindered by the computational limitations of IoT devices and the latency issues associated with cloud and edge computing. Existing collaborative inference approaches aim to mitigate end-to-end latency by offloading computation across devices. However, these methods often compromise model accuracy and add computing latency in generating inference strategies. To address these challenges, we present CoFANN, a novel collaborative framework to accelerate DNN inference in dynamic IoT environments. Our framework includes two key advances: a differentiable strategy search space with a gradient-based optimization algorithm for efficiently identify optimal partitioning strategies, and an adaptive model partitioning algorithm that effectively divides and allocates DNN components across computing devices based on their capabilities and network conditions. Experimental results in the plant disease dataset demonstrate that CoFANN reduces the total inference latency by up to 70% compared to device-only and 50% compared to edge-only approaches under varying network conditions, while maintaining comparable accuracy from 93.7% to 95.8%.