"Why This Avoidance Maneuver?" Contrastive Explanations in Human-Supervised Maritime Autonomous Navigation

Automated maritime collision avoidance will rely on human supervision for the foreseeable future. This necessitates transparency into how the system perceives a scenario and plans a maneuver. However, the causal logic behind avoidance maneuvers is often complex and difficult to convey to a navigator. This paper explores how to explain these factors in a selective, understandable manner for supervisors with a nautical background. We propose a method for generating contrastive explanations, which provide human-centric insights by comparing a system's proposed solution against relevant alternatives. To evaluate this, we developed a framework that uses visual and textual cues to highlight key objectives from a state-of-the-art collision avoidance system. An exploratory user study with four experienced marine officers suggests that contrastive explanations support the understanding of the system's objectives. However, our findings also reveal that while these explanations are highly valuable in complex multi-vessel encounters, they can increase cognitive workload, suggesting that future maritime interfaces may benefit most from demand-driven or scenario-specific explanation strategies.

An Open Hyperspectral Dataset with Sea-Land-Cloud Ground-Truth from the HYPSO-1 Satellite

Hyperspectral Imaging, employed in satellites for space remote sensing, like HYPSO-1, faces constraints due to few labeled data sets, affecting the training of AI models demanding these ground-truth annotations. In this work, we introduce The HYPSO-1 Sea-Land-Cloud-Labeled Dataset, an open dataset with 200 diverse hyperspectral images from the HYPSO-1 mission, available in both raw and calibrated forms for scientific research in Earth observation. Moreover, 38 of these images from different countries include ground-truth labels at pixel-level totaling about 25 million spectral signatures labeled for sea/land/cloud categories. To demonstrate the potential of the dataset and its labeled subset, we have additionally optimized a deep learning model (1D Fully Convolutional Network), achieving superior performance to the current state of the art. The complete dataset, ground-truth labels, deep learning model, and software code are openly accessible for download at the website https://ntnu-smallsat-lab.github.io/hypso1_sea_land_clouds_dataset/ .