SimpleEfficientCNN: A Lightweight and Efficient Deep Learning Framework for High-Precision Rice Seed Classification

Rice seed variety classification is crucial for seed quality control and breeding, yet practical deployment is often limited by the computational and memory demands of modern deep models. We propose SimpleEfficientCNN (SimpleEfficient: simple & efficient; CNN: convolutional neural network), an ultra-lightweight convolutional network built on depthwise separable convolutions for efficient fine-grained seed classification. Experiments were conducted on three datasets with distinct imaging characteristics: a self-constructed Guangdong dataset (7 varieties; 10,500 seeds imaged once and expanded to 112 K images via post-split augmentation), the public M600 rice subset (7 varieties; 9100 original images expanded to 112 K images using the same post-split augmentation pipeline for scale-matched comparison), and the International dataset (75 K images; official train/validation/test split provided by the original release and used as-is without any preprocessing or augmentation, 5 varieties). SimpleEfficientCNN achieved 98.52%, 88.07%, and 99.37% accuracy on the Guangdong, M600, and International test sets, respectively. With only 0.231 M parameters (≈92× fewer than ResNet34), it required 20.5 MB peak GPU memory and delivered 2.0 ms GPU latency (RTX 4090D, batch = 1, FP32) and 1.8 ms single-thread CPU median latency (Ryzen 9 7950X3D, batch = 1, FP32). These results indicate that competitive accuracy can be achieved with substantially reduced model size and inference cost, supporting deployment in resource-constrained agricultural settings.