Explainable AI for Cotton Leaf Disease Classification: A Metaheuristic-Optimized Deep Learning Approach

Cotton leaf diseases significantly impact global cotton yield and quality, threatening the livelihoods of millions of farmers. Traditional diagnostic methods are often slow, subjective, and unsuitable for large-scale agricultural monitoring. This study proposes an interpretable and efficient deep learning (DL) framework for the accurate classification of cotton leaf diseases using a hybrid architecture that combines EfficientNetB3 and InceptionResNetV2. The system demonstrates excellent performance, achieving 98.0% accuracy, 98.1% precision, 97.9% recall, an F1-score of 98.0%, and an AUC-ROC of 0.9992. Minimal overfitting was observed, with low training and validation losses and high per-class performance, even in visually similar disease cases such as bacterial blight and target spot. In addition to strong predictive accuracy, the framework incorporates explainable AI (XAI) techniques, including LIME and SHAP, to enhance model transparency. These tools highlight the key visual features used in predictions, providing valuable insights for agronomists and improving trust in AI-based systems. The model is lightweight and scalable, making it deployable on mobile or edge devices for real-time field applications. Overall, this research demonstrates the potential of combining transfer learning and XAI to develop reliable, interpretable, and field-ready diagnostic tools for precision agriculture.