Interpretable Plant Leaf Disease Detection Using Attention-Enhanced CNN
It addresses the need for accurate and interpretable disease detection in agriculture to enhance food security, though it is incremental as it builds on existing CNNs and attention mechanisms.
This study tackled plant leaf disease detection by introducing an interpretable attention-guided CNN, achieving up to 98.87% accuracy on diverse datasets and demonstrating robust generalization.
Plant diseases pose a significant threat to global food security, necessitating accurate and interpretable disease detection methods. This study introduces an interpretable attention-guided Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), CBAM-VGG16, for plant leaf disease detection. By integrating Convolution Block Attention Module (CBAM) at each convolutional stage, the model enhances feature extraction and disease localization. Trained on five diverse plant disease datasets, our approach outperforms recent techniques, achieving high accuracy (up to 98.87%) and demonstrating robust generalization. Here, we show the effectiveness of our method through comprehensive evaluation and interpretability analysis using CBAM attention maps, Grad-CAM, Grad-CAM++, and Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP). This study advances the application of explainable AI in agricultural diagnostics, offering a transparent and reliable system for smart farming. The code of our proposed work is available at https://github.com/BS0111/PlantAttentionCBAM.