ExplainableCropAI: Interpretable Deep Learning for Agricultural Disease Diagnosis and Decision Support

Abstract

Deep learning models classify crop diseases accurately, but their black-box nature limits practical use: farmers and extension officers need to understand a diagnosis before acting on it. We present ExplainableCropAI, a decision-support system for paddy disease diagnosis that attaches three complementary explanation channels to a ConvNeXt V2-Tiny classifier: Grad-CAM++ visual attribution, Monte Carlo Dropout uncertainty with temperature-scaled calibration, and natural-language explanations generated by Phi-3-mini under a grounding constraint that restricts the model to typed fields drawn from the prediction, the attribution map and a curated agronomic knowledge base. None of the components is new; the contribution lies in their integration into a single pipeline and in measuring the properties that integration is meant to deliver. On a leakage-controlled, held-out test split of 1,540 images from the Paddy Doctor dataset (10,407 images, nine diseases and healthy), the classifier reaches 97.5% accuracy (95% CI 96.7–98.3) and macro-F1 of 96.9%. Six attribution methods are compared under identical settings with model-based faithfulness metrics; the calibrated confidence separates correct from incorrect predictions with an AUROC of 0.93, and referring the 10% least-confident cases to an expert removes 74% of all errors. Under eight image corruptions at five severities the model retains 89.7% mean accuracy against 72–78% for six baselines trained identically, and its referral rate rises with the degree of degradation. Zero-shot evaluation on two independently collected rice-disease datasets from Bangladesh and India shows that accuracy roughly halves under cross-dataset shift and that confidence no longer identifies errors, while fifty local images per class recover accuracy above 90%. The code, split files, trained weights and evaluation scripts are released.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. International Journal of Computational Intelligence Systems, 2026 · DOI ↗