This work presents the development of an ADAS (advanced driving assistance system) focused on driver drowsiness detection, whose objective is to alert drivers of their drowsy state to avoid road traffic accidents. In a driving environment, it is necessary that fatigue detection is performed in a non-intrusive way, and that the driver is not bothered with alarms when he or she is not drowsy. Our approach to this open problem uses sequences of images that are 60 s long and are recorded in such a way that the subject’s face is visible. To detect whether the driver shows symptoms of drowsiness or not, two alternative solutions are developed, focusing on the minimization of false positives. The first alternative uses a recurrent and convolutional neural network, while the second one uses deep learning techniques to extract numeric features from images, which are introduced into a fuzzy logic-based system afterwards. The accuracy obtained by both systems is similar: around 65% accuracy over training data, and 60% accuracy on test data. However, the fuzzy logic-based system stands out because it avoids raising false alarms and reaches a specificity (proportion of videos in which the driver is not drowsy that are correctly classified) of 93%. Although the obtained results do not achieve very satisfactory rates, the proposals presented in this work are promising and can be considered a solid baseline for future works.

Different systems based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques are currently used in relevant areas such as healthcare, cybersecurity, natural language processing, and self-driving cars. However, many of these systems are developed with “black box” AI, which makes it difficult to explain how they work. For this reason, explainability and interpretability are key factors that need to be taken into consideration in the development of AI systems in critical areas. In addition, different contexts produce different explainability needs which must be met. Against this background, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) appears to be able to address and solve this situation. In the field of automated driving, XAI is particularly needed because the level of automation is constantly increasing according to the development of AI techniques. For this reason, the field of XAI in the context of automated driving is of particular interest. In this paper, we propose the use of an explainable intelligence technique in the understanding of some of the tasks involved in the development of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). Since ADAS assist drivers in driving functions, it is essential to know the reason for the decisions taken. In addition, trusted AI is the cornerstone of the confidence needed in this research area. Thus, due to the complexity and the different variables that are part of the decision-making process, this paper focuses on two specific tasks in this area: the detection of emotions and the distractions of drivers. The results obtained are promising and show the capacity of the explainable artificial techniques in the different tasks of the proposed environments.