An attention enhanced CNN ensemble for interpretable and accurate cotton leaf disease classification

Precise and timely identification of cotton leaf diseases is essential for sustaining crop yield and quality, yet manual inspection remains time-consuming, labor-intensive, and prone to error. Existing automated approaches are limited by insufficient dataset diversity, inconsistent evaluation practices, limited use of explainable AI (XAI), and high computational cost. To address these challenges, we propose an attention-enhanced CNN ensemble, namely CottonLeafNet, which integrates lightweight convolutional neural networks for accurate cotton leaf disease classification across two publicly available datasets. CottonLeafNet achieves state-of-the-art performance, obtaining 98.33% accuracy, a macro F1-score of 0.9833, Cohen's kappa of 0.9800, a mean PPV of 0.9838, and an NPV of 0.9967 on Dataset D1, with an inference time of 0.51 s per image. On Dataset D2, it reaches…