# Deep interpretable architecture for plant diseases classification

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel deep learning architecture with built-in visualization for plant disease classification, enhancing interpretability while maintaining high accuracy on a large dataset.

## Contribution

A new CNN-based architecture with Teacher-Student multitask learning for transparent plant disease classification and improved visualization quality.

## Key findings

- Sharper visualization of important image regions.
- Effective classification on PlantVillage dataset.
- Enhanced interpretability of deep models.

## Abstract

Recently, many works have been inspired by the success of deep learning in computer vision for plant diseases classification. Unfortunately, these end-to-end deep classifiers lack transparency which can limit their adoption in practice. In this paper, we propose a new trainable visualization method for plant diseases classification based on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture composed of two deep classifiers. The first one is named Teacher and the second one Student. This architecture leverages the multitask learning to train the Teacher and the Student jointly. Then, the communicated representation between the Teacher and the Student is used as a proxy to visualize the most important image regions for classification. This new architecture produces sharper visualization than the existing methods in plant diseases context. All experiments are achieved on PlantVillage dataset that contains 54306 plant images.