CottonNet-MHA: a multi-head attention-based deep learning framework for cotton disease detection

India is an agro-based country. The major goal of agriculture is to produce disease-free healthy crops. For Indian agronomists, cotton is a profitable commercial and fibre crop, it is the world's second-biggest export crop after China. Cotton production is also affected in a negative way by high use of water, authority of soil erosion and the practice of using dangerous fertilizers and pesticides. The two greatest threats to the rapid growth of the crop are the sucking bugs and cotton diseases. Prompt detection and accurate identification of diseases is vital to ensure healthy crop growth and achieve better yields. The primary objective of this research is to build a model by implementing deep learning-based approaches to spot infections in cotton crops. Deep learning is used because of its exceptional results in classification and image processing tasks. To address this issue, we developed CottonNet-MHA a novel deep learning framework to identify pathological symptoms in cotton leaves. The model employs multi-head attention mechanisms to strengthen feature learning and highlight the diseased-affected regions. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model, five pretrained transfer learning architectures-VGG16, VGG19, InceptionV3, Xception, and MobileNet were used as benchmark models. Furthermore, Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) visualization was applied to enhance the trustworthiness and interpretability of the model. A web-based application was developed to deploy the trained model for real-world applicability. The performance analysis is carried out on the developed model based on the conventional models and the results indicate that CottonNet-MHA dominates the conventional models with respect to its accuracy as well as efficiency in the detection of diseases. The use of attention mechanisms approach strengthens the model's diagnostic accuracy and overall reliability. Grad-CAM results further demonstrated that the model effectively targets diseased areas, enhancing interpretability and reliability. Discussion: The study shows that CottonNet-MHA not only automates disease detection but also enhances interpretability through Grad-CAM analysis. The developed web platform allows the model to be applied in real-world environments, supporting live disease monitoring. The proposed framework not only improves the accuracy of cotton disease diagnosis but also offers potential for extension to other crop disease detection systems.