Enhancing Plant Disease Detection: Incorporating Advanced CNN Architectures for Better Accuracy and Interpretability

Abstract Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have proven effective in automated plant disease diagnosis, significantly contributing to crop health monitoring. However, their limited interpretability hinders practical deployment in real-world agricultural settings. To address this, we explore advanced CNN architectures, namely ResNet-50 and EfficientNet, augmented with attention mechanisms. These models enhance accuracy by optimizing depth, width, and resolution, while attention layers improve transparency by focusing on disease-relevant regions. Experiments using the PlantVillage dataset show that basic CNNs achieve 46.69% accuracy, while ResNet-50 and EfficientNet attain 63.79% and 98.27%, respectively. On a 39-class extended dataset, our proposed EfficientNet-B0 with attention (EfficientNetB0-Attn), integrating an attention module at layer 262, achieves 99.39% accuracy. This approach significantly enhances interpretability without compromising performance. The attention module generates weights via backpropagation, allowing the model to emphasize disease-relevant image regions, thereby enhancing both accuracy and interpretability.