Advancing Multi-Label Tomato Leaf Disease Identification Using Vision Transformer and EfficientNet with Explainable AI Techniques

Plant diseases pose a significant threat to global food security, affecting crop yield, quality, and overall agricultural productivity. Traditionally, diagnosing plant diseases has relied on time-consuming visual inspections by experts, which can often lead to errors. Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), particularly Vision Transformers (ViTs), and Convolutional Neural Networks, offer a faster, automated alternative for identifying plant diseases through leaf image analysis. However, these models are often criticized for their “black box” nature, limiting trust in their predictions due to a lack of transparency. Our findings show that incorporating Explainable AI (XAI) techniques, such as Grad-CAM, Integrated Gradients, and LIME, significantly improves model interpretability, making it easier for practitioners to identify the underlying symptoms of plant diseases. This study not only contributes to the field of plant disease detection but also offers a novel perspective on improving AI transparency in real-world agricultural applications through the use of XAI techniques. With training accuracies of 100.00% for ViT, 96.88% for EfficientNetB7, 93.75% for EfficientNetB0, and 87.50% for ResNet50, and corresponding validation accuracies of 96.39% for ViT, 86.98% for EfficientNetB7, and 82.00% for EfficientNetB0, our proposed models outperform earlier research on the same dataset. This demonstrates a notable improvement in model performance while maintaining transparency and trustworthiness through interpretable and reliable decision-making.