PlantVLM-Edge: Quantized Vision-Language Models for On-Device Crop Health Diagnosis
Gaurab Wagle, Bishal Adhikari, Jiajia Li, Xiaolei Huang, Dong Chen
Abstract
Timely and accurate crop health diagnosis is essential for sustainable agricultural production, yet accurate diagnosis often requires expert knowledge that is not readily available. Recent vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in visual understanding, reasoning, and natural-language interaction, creating new opportunities for intelligent crop health assessment. However, deploying VLMs on resource-constrained devices remains challenging due to their substantial computational and memory requirements. This paper presents PlantVLM-Edge, a quantized vision-language framework for conversational crop health diagnosis that can run entirely on resource-constrained edge devices. PlantVLM-Edge combines agricultural domain adaptation, post-training quantization, and on-device serving with an offline chat interface, allowing growers to ask open-ended questions and receive diagnoses, symptom explanations, and management guidance without cloud connectivity. The framework is backbone-agnostic: we validate it with two different VLM types with varying scale and architecture (Qwen3-VL-2B and LLaVA-1.5-7B), four quantization schemes, and two diagnostic domains (plant diseases and insect pests), and we deploy all variants on an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin. Eight-bit quantization affects answer quality minimally relative to the full-precision model, and 4-bit activation-aware weight quantization (AWQ) retains 98.6% of full-precision answer quality on both domains while reducing the weight memory of the 2B backbone by 49%. In its most compact form, PlantVLM-Edge requires 2.01 GiB of weight memory, returns its first token in about 0.12 s, and completes a 64-token diagnostic response in 0.78 s. These results demonstrate that timely and accurate crop health diagnosis is practical on edge devices, providing a foundation for next-generation crop monitoring and decision support systems.