Explainable Deep Learning for Intelligent Plant Disease Detection

Abstract

The world suffers from 10–40% loss in crop yields each year because of plant disease. This threat is serious and growing; it threatens food security, rural livelihoods, and agricultural economies. Advances being made through deep learning, computer vision, and mobile technology have presented a unique opportunity to use leaf images to automatically recognize plant disease. Published classification accuracies on benchmark datasets now exceed 97%, which is an important achievement but achieving high accuracy on a benchmark alone does not indicate that traditional methods will work when deployed in the real world: all four stakeholders (i.e., farmers, agronomists, regulatory authorities, and extension agents) must therefore have the ability to understand, and interpret the output of automatically recognized plant diseases in a way that enhances human expertise rather than replacing it. In this chapter, we provide a compendium of technical deep learning architectures and methods related to Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) for plant disease detection, including convolutional networks, residual architectures, dense architectures, transformer networks, and hybrid models. We also systematically evaluate the explainability methods used in both post-hoc and intrinsic explanation and evaluate the applicability of these methods across a variety of imaging modalities used in agriculture, including RGB, multispectral, and hyperspectral. This chapter characterizes major benchmark datasets; discusses major challenges to their deployment, including class imbalance, domain shift, model size reduction, and human–AI trust calibration; then ends with potential new directions for research in areas such as foundation models (FM), causal interpretable models (Explanations), federated learning, and continual learning to build resilience for each evolving pathogen landscape.

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物病害を葉画像から自動認識する画像ベースの表現型推定手法と、その説明可能性・データセット・評価課題を体系的に扱うレビューであり、方法論が中心である。

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