AMnet: An Explainable Graph Based Inception Framework for Aegle marmelos Leaf Disease Classification

Aegle marmelos (bael) is a medicinally important tropical crop that remains severely underrepresented in computational plant pathology research. This study proposes AMnet, a deep learning framework integrating an InceptionV3 backbone with a fixed graph convolutional network to capture both within-region disease texture and between-region spatial propagation patterns for automated four-class classification of Aegle marmelos leaf diseases: Cercospora leaf, healthy leaf, leaf curl, and leaf spot. The graph module constructs a 25-node spatial graph directly from CNN feature maps, enabling end-to-end training without external preprocessing. Compared against MobileNetV2, InceptionV3, VGG19, and DenseNet201, AMnet achieved the best overall performance with 98.83% accuracy, 98.84% F1-score, 99.95% PR-AUC, and 98.45% MCC, alongside the fastest inference time of 1.83 ms. Robustness was confirmed through bootstrap confidence interval estimation and four-fold cross-validation. PCA-based clustering analysis with silhouette scoring and Davies–Bouldin indexing demonstrated clear class separability in the learned embeddings. Grad-CAM and LIME visualizations confirmed that predictions were grounded in biologically meaningful leaf regions rather than background artifacts. A Gradio-based prototype further demonstrated practical deployment potential. Although broader field validation remains necessary, AMnet provides an accurate, interpretable, and reproducible framework for diagnosing Aegle marmelos leaf disease.