A Novel MaxViT Model for Accelerated and Precise Soybean Leaf and Seed Disease Identification

Timely diagnosis of soybean diseases is essential to protect yields and limit global economic loss, yet current deep learning approaches suffer from small, imbalanced datasets, single-organ focus, and limited interpretability. We propose MaxViT-XSLD (MaxViT XAI-Seed–Leaf-Diagnostic), a Vision Transformer that integrates multiaxis attention with MBConv layers to jointly classify soybean leaf and seed diseases while remaining lightweight and explainable. Two benchmark datasets were upscaled through elastic deformation, Gaussian noise, brightness shifts, rotation, and flipping, enlarging ASDID from 10,722 to 16,000 images (eight classes) and the SD set from 5513 to 10,000 images (five classes). Under identical augmentation and hyperparameters, MaxViT-XSLD delivered 99.82% accuracy on ASDID and 99.46% on SD, surpassing competitive ViT, CNN, and lightweight SOTA variants. High PR-AUC and MCC values, confirmed via 10-fold stratified cross-validation and Wilcoxon tests, demonstrate robust generalization across data splits. Explainable AI (XAI) techniques further enhanced interpretability by highlighting biologically relevant features influencing predictions. Its modular design also enables future model compression for edge deployment in resource-constrained settings. Finally, we deploy the model in SoyScan, a real-time web tool that streams predictions and visual explanations to growers and agronomists. These findings establishes a scalable, interpretable system for precision crop health monitoring and lay the groundwork for edge-oriented, multimodal agricultural diagnostics.