AgriX-SENet: Squeeze-and-Excitation-based deep learning framework for explainable plant disease detection in sustainable agriculture

Abstract

Introduction Timely and accurate detection of plant diseases is essential for ensuring global food security and supporting sustainable agriculture. Conventional diagnostic approaches, such as manual inspection and laboratory testing, are often time-consuming, labor-intensive, and impractical for large-scale or remote agricultural environments. Although deep learning models, particularly Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), have significantly improved automated plant disease classification, they often lack interpretability and struggle to generalize under diverse field conditions. Methods This study proposes AgriX-SENet, an explainable deep learning framework that integrates Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) blocks with a DenseNet121 backbone to enhance disease classification performance. The SE blocks recalibrate channel-wise feature responses to emphasize disease-relevant information while suppressing background noise. To improve model transparency, Grad-CAM, SHAP, and LIME were incorporated to provide visual and feature-level explanations of the model’s predictions. The framework was trained and evaluated using the Plant Pathology 2020 dataset containing four classes: healthy, rust, scab, and multiple diseases. Results AgriX-SENet achieved a training accuracy of 97.47% and a validation accuracy of 95.07%, outperforming fourteen state-of-the-art deep learning models. The classification report demonstrated high precision and recall across most disease categories, although the scab class exhibited comparatively lower recall, indicating an opportunity for further improvement. The explainability analyses consistently showed that the model focused on pathologically relevant regions of leaf images, validating the reliability of its predictions. Discussion The proposed AgriX-SENet framework effectively combines high classification performance with model interpretability, addressing a key limitation of existing CNN-based plant disease detection systems. Its ability to provide accurate and explainable predictions makes it a promising solution for scalable agricultural diagnostics. Future work will focus on improving classification performance for challenging disease categories and optimizing the framework for deployment on mobile and edge computing devices to enable real-time field applications.

Plant phenotyping relevance

葉画像から植物病害状態を推定する説明可能な深層学習フレームワークを開発・評価しており、植物表現型取得・判定手法が中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper trains and evaluates AgriX-SENet on the public Plant Pathology 2020 (FGVC7) Kaggle image dataset, which is the paper-specific plant image input for its disease-classification measurements. No author analysis code, trained model checkpoints, or supplementary code/data deposit is mentioned; the data statement (