Class Activation Mapping in Explainable Computer Vision: A Method-Centered Review of CNN, Transformer, and Foundation-Model-Era Visual Explanations

AmirHossein Eshghi, Hamid Saadatfar, Seyyed Ali Hoseini +3

Class activation mapping (CAM) is one of the most widely used visual explanation families in explainable artificial intelligence. Its purpose is intuitive: it converts internal mod…