PD-ViCo: an explainable AI-based contrastive captioner vision transformer with patch dropout for multi-class brinjal disease classification

Brinjal (eggplant) is a critical crop in South Asia, especially in Bangladesh, but its production is drastically affected by numerous diseases that inhibit yield and quality. Manual diagnosis of disease is time-consuming, subjective, and prone to errors, necessitating automated, scalable technology. To address these issues, this paper proposes PD-ViCo, a lightweight, efficient transformer-based model for brinjal fruit disease classification using Simple Vision Transformer (ViT) with Patch Dropout and Contrastive Captioner (CoCa) methods. One new dataset of 1,823 field-harvested brinjal images encompassing five disease classes including Phomopsis Blight, Fruit and Shoot Borer, Fruit Cracking, Wet Rot, and Healthy samples were prepared through real-world agricultural data collection from Bangladesh. The approach includes extensive preprocessing, class balancing (under-sampling/oversampling), and resilient augmentation methods. The PD-ViCo model significantly improves classification performance under data imbalance with patch dropout regularization and CoCa-style aggregation, resulting in better generalization and robustness. On a range of imbalanced, under-sampled, and oversampled datasets, PD-ViCo achieved a classification accuracy of 99.12% and F1-score of 97.76%, outperforming both ViT and Swin Transformer across all key evaluation metrics. Explainability was also applied using Grad-CAM and Grad-CAM + + , generating visual explanations of model decisions and maintaining conformity to disease-affected regions in the images. These visualizations ensure the credibility of the model and its usability for real agricultural conditions. This study demonstrates that PD-ViCo is a highly accurate, interpretable, and lightweight model for multi-class brinjal disease diagnosis. Not only does it advance state-of-the-art in agricultural AI, but it also provides a valuable dataset and an understandable decision-making protocol that can be applied directly by farmers, agronomists, and agricultural technologists.