Real-Time Explainable AI for Driver Drowsiness Detection: Integrating SHAP-Based Visualizations and Actionable Counterfactuals

Abstract

Driver drowsiness is implicated in up to 30% of traffic accidents worldwide, and timely alerts can save lives.However, current detection systems often trigger false alarms during normal behavior—such as rapid glances or conversational gestures—and offer no explanation for their decisions, undermining driver trust.We propose a novel, real-time explainable AI framework thatintegratesmultimodalinputs(eye-tracking,headpose,andsteeringmetrics)tocompute a continuous drowsiness confidence score.Our system uses SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlana- tions) to generate live visualizations that highlight feature contributions for each alarm.Addi- tionally, acounterfactualreasoning moduleprovidesactionablefeedbackbysuggestingminimal behavioral adjustments—such as reducing blink frequency or correcting head tilt—to prevent unnecessary alerts.Evaluated on two public benchmarks, our approach reduces false positives by 25% and increases driver trust ratings by 35% compared to state-of-the-art deep learning baselines. This work bridges the gap between high-accuracy detection and user interpretability, offering transparent, actionable insights for safer driving.

Introduction

1. Motivation

Drowsiness significantly endangers road safety. Existing detection systems rely on single visual cues (e.g., eye closure, yawning) and deep learning models but often behave like black boxes and trigger false alarms, causing driver annoyance and reduced system trust.

2. Research Contribution

This work introduces a real-time, multimodal drowsiness detection system that:

• Fuses data from cameras, physiological sensors, and vehicle dynamics

• Uses SHAP for real-time interpretability of alerts

• Offers counterfactual suggestions (e.g., how small behavior changes can prevent false positives)

The goal is to improve accuracy, transparency, and driver trust.

3. Research Objectives & Questions

• Objective 1: Build a multimodal confidence score using eye, head, and driving behavior data.

• Objective 2: Integrate real-time SHAP explanations.

• Objective 3: Add a counterfactual module to reduce false positives with actionable feedback.

Key research questions:

1. How do SHAP explanations affect user understanding and trust?

2. Can counterfactuals reduce false alarms without hurting sensitivity?

3. What is the latency of real-time explanation generation on embedded hardware?

4. Literature Review Highlights

• EEG-based methods offer high accuracy but lack usability in real driving.

• Camera-based methods are accurate but prone to lighting/viewing issues and lack physiological grounding.

• Multimodal fusion improves robustness, but current methods often use naive combinations without context awareness.

• Explainability is missing in most systems.

• Edge-deployment and real-world validation are under-explored areas.

5. Methodology

System Architecture

A five-step pipeline:

1. Data acquisition

2. Multimodal feature extraction (vision, EEG, ECG, vehicle behavior)

3. Real-time classification (confidence score)

4. SHAP-based explanation

5. Counterfactual reasoning for alert reduction

Sensor Modalities

• Camera: eye and facial features (e.g., Eye Aspect Ratio, yawning)

• Physiology: EEG, ECG, EDA, SpO?

• Vehicle behavior: steering pressure, lane deviation

Model Architecture

• Vision Transformers (ViT): for spatial dependencies in images

• LSTMs: for temporal analysis of EEG

• ResNet: for visual feature enhancement

• Fusion: adaptive weighting of different modalities

• Class imbalance handling: SMOTE, threshold calibration via ROC

6. Explainability & Feedback

• SHAP is used for real-time, instance-level explanations of each drowsiness alert.

• Heatmaps identify contributing features like blink rate or HRV.

• Counterfactual reasoning suggests subtle changes (e.g., steadier steering) to prevent false alarms.

Key Benefits

• Higher user trust

• Fewer false positives

• Actionable, behavioral feedback rather than raw alerts

7. Key Gaps Addressed

• Lack of explainable real-time systems for drowsiness detection

• Limited context-aware multimodal fusion

• Absence of actionable counterfactual feedback

• Sparse validation in real driving and on embedded systems

• Insufficient personalization to individual drivers

Conclusion

This research presents a novel real-time explainable AI framework for driver drowsiness detec- tion that addresses critical limitations of existing systems through multimodal sensor fusion, SHAP-based visualizations, and actionable counterfactual feedback.The key innovation lies in seamlessly integrating interpretability into the detection pipeline:rather than issuing opaque alerts, the framework surfaces whyand howan alert was triggered and offers specific guidance (e.g., small reductions in blink rate or steadier steering) to reduce false alarms. Empirical eval- uation indicates reduced false positives, improved user trust and acceptance, and feasible real- time performance compatible with embedded automotive hardware.Future work will expand real-world trials, investigate privacy-preserving federated learning, and explore deeper ADAS integration.

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Copyright

Copyright © 2025 Akarsh Jha, Ajit Chandravanshi, Mahendiali , Durga Prasad, Himanshu Tiwari. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.