Explainable deep learning model for automatic mulberry leaf disease classification

Mulberry leaves feed Bombyx mori silkworms to generate silk thread. Diseases that affect mulberry leaves have reduced crop and silk yields in sericulture, which produces 90% of the world's raw silk. Manual leaf disease identification is tedious and error-prone. Computer vision can categorize leaf diseases early and overcome the challenges of manual identification. No mulberry leaf deep learning (DL) models have been reported. Therefore, in this study, two types of leaf diseases: leaf rust and leaf spot, with disease-free leaves, were collected from two regions of Bangladesh. Sericulture experts annotated the leaf images. The images were pre-processed, and 6,000 synthetic images were generated using typical image augmentation methods from the original 764 training images. Additional 218 and 109 images were…