Enhancing Maize Crop Health: An Explainable AI Approach for Leaf Disease Detection Using Deep Learning

Maize is an economically valuable crop raised in the region of Tamil Nadu, particularly around Tirupur, Coimbatore, and Erode, for usage as food, animal feed, and industries. But growth of the crop is highly impacted by diseases like blight, gray leaf spot, and rust affecting the leaves of the plants, leading to reduced photosynthesis and loss of yield/economic loss. Early detection of diseases is required for efficient crop management. Manual crop disease detection takes time and leads to inaccurate diagnoses. Therefore, an automated system for crop disease detection using CNN is proposed in this research work for maize crop leaves. This system has the advantage of identifying crop diseases and also helps identify affected areas of the leaves using Grad-CAM. This system also has the advantage of providing quick results for farmers to act accordingly and increase agricultural productivity.