A hybrid SE-ResNet50 deep learning framework for high-accuracy and explainable cotton leaf disease classification

Cotton production is highly vulnerable to foliar diseases and pest-induced damage, which significantly reduce yield and compromise fiber quality. Rapid, reliable, and automated disease identification is therefore essential for supporting sustainable crop management. In this study, we propose a hybrid deep learning framework integrating a ResNet50 backbone with Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) channel attention modules to enhance discriminative feature representation for cotton leaf disease classification. The model is trained on a publicly available disease dataset comprising six classes and optimized using Weighted CrossEntropyLoss, Adam optimization, ReduceLROnPlateau scheduling, and Early Stopping to ensure stable convergence and robust generalization. Experimental results demonstrate outstanding performance, achieving 99.72% training accuracy and 99.31% validation accuracy, with convergence at the 14th epoch. Visualization through Grad-CAM reveals that the model focuses on biologically relevant symptom regions, thereby enhancing interpretability and supporting expert validation. Comparative analysis with state-of-the-art methods shows that the proposed model surpasses existing CNN, transfer learning, and hybrid architectures in both accuracy and model transparency. These results indicate that the proposed SE-ResNet50 framework offers a highly accurate, interpretable, and computationally efficient solution suitable for real-world cotton disease monitoring and precision agriculture applications.Clinical trial registrationThis study is not a clinical trial; therefore, clinical trial registration is not applicable.