Journal of Intelligent Systems and Internet of Things JISIoT 2690-6791 2769-786X 10.54216/JISIoT https://www.americaspg.com/journals/show/3725 2019 2019 Department of Computer Engineering Techniques, College of Technical Engineering, University of Al Maarif, Al Anbar, 31001, Iraq Abdalrahman Abdalrahman Department of Computer Engineering Techniques, College of Technical Engineering, University of Al Maarif, Al Anbar, 31001, Iraq Karam Hatem Alkhater Renewable Energy Research Center, University of Anbar, Al Anbar, 31001, Iraq Qusay Hatem Alsultan Department of Computer Science and Information Technology, College of Science, University of Hilla, 51001 Babil, Iraq Zaid Sami Mohsen Department of Computer Engineering Techniques, College of Technical Engineering, University of Al Maarif, Al Anbar, 31001, Iraq Munther Naif Thiyab College of Applied Sciences – Heet, University of Anbar, Al Anbar, 31001, Iraq Mohammed Waheeb Hamad College of computer science and IT, University of Anbar, Al-Ramdi, Iraq Ahmed Jumaah Yas Early detection of plant diseases is critical to minimizing their adverse effects on agricultural productivity. In particular, machine vision and deep learning approaches (e.g., convolutional neural networks, CNNs) have been increasingly applied for automatic plant disease identification. Although existing deep learning models achieve satisfying classification accuracy, they often consist of millions of parameters that significantly lead to the lengthy training time, prohibitive calculation costs and deployment obstacles at the resource-constrained edge devices. In order to overcome those constraints, we introduce a new deep learning architecture, which uses adaptations of Inception layers and residual connections that can help both with feature extraction and efficiency. In addition, depthwise separable convolutions are used to drastically reduce the amount of trainable parameters with small loss of representational power. We perform training and evaluation of the proposed model on three located benchmark plant disease datasets, PlantVillage dataset, the Rice Disease dataset. Experimental results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art classification accuracy of 99.39% on the PlantVillage dataset, 98.66% on the Rice Disease dataset. In contrast to the state-of-the-art deep learning models, our method obtains higher accuracy with fewer parameters so that it could be better suited for real-time applications on mobile and embedded systems. We explore an application of deep learning with the use of optimized architectures and present the viability of this technique in precision agriculture for faster and more accurate diagnosis of diseases in plants with lower computational load. 2025 2025 246 256 10.54216/JISIoT.160218 https://www.americaspg.com/articleinfo/18/show/3725