Explainable AI-Driven Convolution Neural Network for Quality Grading of Soybean Seeds

This study developed a soybean seed grading system based on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). Traditional soybean quality assessment is time-consuming, and limited research has applied explainable AI methods to the grading process. To address these issues, this study employed classification and XAI methods through several stages. First, it examined five main categories of soybean seed characteristics: broken, immature, intact, skin-damaged, and spotted. Second, it used the Soybean Seeds Dataset contain-ing 5,513 images. Third, data preprocessing was carried out, including image normalization and data division for training and testing. Finally, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model based on the VGG-16 architecture was used for classification experiments. Three XAI methods, namely Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP), Local Interpretable Model Agnostic Explanations (LIME), and Layerwise Relevance Propagation (LRP), were applied to evaluate model performance and interpretability. The VGG-16 model achieved an accuracy of 91%, with precision, recall, and F1-score values of 0.91, 0.91, and 0.90, respectively. The interpretability analysis using SHAP, LIME, and LRP showed that the model consistently identified key features such as seed shape and surface texture, demonstrating that the system is transparent and reliable in determining soybean seed quality.