An Attention-Enhanced CNN with Explainable AI for Driver Behavior Detection in Intelligent Transportation Systems

Driver behavior detection is essential for improving road safety in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs). This paper proposes an attention-enhanced CNN integrated with Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) to achieve reliable and interpretable driver behavior classification. Furthermore, the model also uses a multi-head attention mechanism to ensure that it captures local spatial features as well as long-range dependencies in the activities of the driver. The State Farm Distracted Driver dataset is experimented with using stratified 5-fold cross-validation. The proposed MHA-CNN model has a mean accuracy of 99.48% on all folds and an overall high levels of precision, recall, and F1-score in all ten distraction classes. Grad-CAM is used to produce attribution maps to improve interpretability by showing semantically important parts of the image, including hands, face, and mobile devices, and can give a visual explanation of why models make decisions. In addition, an ablation investigation is performed with k-fold validation to assess the value of the multi-head attention mechanism. Its model can run at 122 frames per second with 42.92 million parameters, showing that the suggested method is a reasonable tradeoff between accuracy, efficiency, and transparency and can be applied in real-time driver monitoring applications.