Explainable Object Detection

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) solutions are essential for building trust in AI technologies and their integration in real manufacturing lines. However, most existing methods are tailored to technical experts, limiting their accessibility to diverse user groups such as blue-collar workers in manufacturing lines who use AI for quality control. In this work, we introduce an XAI interface for object detection in industrial manufacturing based on a fine-tuned vision-language model, designed to generate intuitive explanations for non-expert users. We benchmark existing vision-language models and demonstrate that out-of-the-box models often fall short in delivering clear, context-relevant explanations for non-expert users. To address this, we fine-tune a vision-language model and integrate it into our interface, enabling contextualized, accessible explanations for non-expert users. We demonstrate improvements in explanation clarity, instruction adherence, image groundedness, and contextual awareness over GPT 4o-mini on proprietary and public robotics dataset. This approach advances the accessibility and usability of AI explanations, making them more intuitive and applicable in manufacturing domain.

Despite the rapid uptake of black-box object detectors in marine mammal research and monitoring, explainability techniques are rarely integrated into conservation workflows. Furthermore, most classification-oriented explainability tools are ill-suited to detection tasks involving imagery of social organisms or those with colonial life histories, as they ignore multiple detections within a scene and produce single-instance outputs that blur evidence across individuals. These methods also generate low-resolution, often biologically irrelevant visuals, limiting their utility for debugging, targeted data augmentation, and refined data collection. We proposed Det-LIME, a detector-aware, multi-instance adaptation of Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) that produced instance-specific, box-aligned explanations by combining per-detection weighting, a proximity kernel that emphasizes regions near each box, and Intersection-over-Union-based matching to track the same instance across perturbations. We evaluated Det-LIME on aerial drone imagery for harbor seal detection, with an additional seabird case study to assess generality, and compared it with vanilla LIME, Stabilized LIME, Deterministic LIME, and gradient-based attribution methods. Using the Attribution Ratio and Max Saliency Hit Rate metrics, we showed that Det-LIME consistently improved multi-instance attribution. In practice, these higher-resolution, instance-aware explanations provide insight into model outputs and support post-processing, debugging, and actionable improvements in modeling and data collection or augmentation.

Visual explainability for object detection remains challenging due to the multi-instance nature of detection. Existing approaches predominantly adopt post-hoc paradigms, such as gradient-based or perturbation-based explanation methods, to interpret pretrained detectors. However, these methods require additional gradient computation or repeated model inference, resulting in limited efficiency. To address this issue, we propose an End-to-end Instance-specific Visual Explanation framework (EIVE) that directly generates instance-level saliency maps following the forward pass of Detection Transformer (DETR)-like models. Specifically, we reformulate the cross-attention mechanism in the decoder as an instance-level feature attribution pathway, so that the cross-attention of each object query corresponds to the visual attribution of its predicted instance. Based on this formulation, we design a cross-layer hybrid consensus fusion (CLHCF) module to aggregate cross-attention signals across decoder layers, producing stable and compact explanations. The explanation process of EIVE requires neither gradient computation nor input perturbation, yielding high computational efficiency, and applies to single- and multi-scale DETR-like object detectors. Finally, we present an attention-aware joint training strategy (AAJTS) as a training-oriented application, which imposes spatial constraints on cross-attention patterns to encourage stable and concentrated attribution representations, thereby improving both interpretability and detection performance. Experiments on MS COCO 2017, ExDark, and Cityscapes demonstrate that EIVE produces high-quality instance-level saliency maps and achieves performance comparable to, or better than, state-of-the-art post-hoc methods across standard metrics, while substantially improving explanation efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/xjlDestiny/EIVE.git.

Interpretability in object detection provides crucial confidence support for clinical auxiliary diagnosis. However, in tiny bacteria detection, traditional explanation methods often suffer from blurred foreground boundaries and diffuse feature attribution due to the extreme sparsity of target morphological features and severe interference from complex backgrounds. Such limitations hinder the provision of logically coherent morphological evidence. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel eXplainable AI (XAI) framework, SAM-Sode. The framework innovatively transforms initial feature attribution maps into geometry-aware prompts, leveraging the prior knowledge of the foundation model (SAM3) to achieve spatial refinement and morphological reconstruction of the explanatory mappings. Furthermore, we introduce a dual-constraint mechanism based on physical significance and geometric alignment to perform instance-level denoising, generating coherent explanations that better align with human expert intuition. Experimental results on our self-constructed bacteria dataset with complex circuit backgrounds (containing 2,524 images) and other public datasets demonstrate that the proposed method effectively suppresses background redundancy and significantly enhances the decision-making transparency of tiny object detection.

Existing object detectors typically make predictions in a black-box manner and struggle to simultaneously provide discriminative evidence for their predictions, which limits their deployment in safety-critical scenarios. To explain model predictions, existing post-hoc explanation methods mostly rely on gradient-based or perturbation-based operators. These methods not only introduce additional memory and computational overhead but also make it difficult to ensure that the generated explanations faithfully reflect the model's internal decision-making process. To address these limitations, we propose PIEDet, a prototype-driven intrinsically explainable object detection framework. PIEDet innovatively embeds class prototypes as explicit discriminative units into the classification branch of a one-stage detector, thereby improving detection performance while providing intrinsic interpretability. First, PIEDet constructs hierarchical class prototypes at different detection levels, enabling the model to learn scale-aware class-semantic representations. Second, we propose a prototype-driven feature learning method consisting of prototype regularization and a region-to-prototype matching loss. The former enhances the inter-class discriminability of the prototypes, while the latter encourages prototype responses to focus on object regions. Finally, we introduce a scale-aligned hierarchical prototype supervision mechanism that assigns scale-matched supervision signals to different detection levels, thereby enhancing the scale specificity of the hierarchical prototypes. On the ExDark, RTTS, and VOC2012-FOG datasets, PIEDet improves [email protected] over the baseline by 4.7%, 1.6%, and 4.8%, respectively, while demonstrating superior computational efficiency. Compared with mainstream post-hoc explanation methods, PIEDet achieves a better balance between explanation quality and explanation cost.

The trustworthy object detection capabilities of a novel Kolmogorov-Arnold network framework are examined here. The approach addresses a key limitation in computer vision for vehicle detection perception, and beyond. These systems offer limited transparency regarding the reliability of their confidence scores in visually degraded or ambiguous scenes. To this end, a Kolmogorov-Arnold network is employed as an interpretable post-hoc surrogate to model the trustworthiness of the You Only Look Once (Yolov10) detections using seven geometric and semantic features. The additive spline-based structure of the Kolmogorov-Arnold network enables direct visualisation of each feature's influence. This produces smooth and transparent functional mappings that reveal when the model's confidence is well supported and when it is unreliable. Furthermore, a bootstrapped language-image (BLIP) foundation model generates descriptive captions of each scene. This tool enables a lightweight multimodal interface without affecting the interpretability layer. Experiments on both Common Objects in Context (COCO), and images from the University of Bath campus demonstrate that the framework accurately identifies low-trust predictions under blur, occlusion, or low texture. This provides actionable insights for acceptance, review, or downstream risk mitigation. The resulting system delivers interpretable object detection with trustworthy confidence estimates. It offers a powerful tool for transparent and practical perception component for autonomous and multimodal artificial intelligence applications.

Deep learning models for flood and wildfire segmentation and object detection enable precise, real-time disaster localization when deployed on embedded drone platforms. However, in natural disaster management, the lack of transparency in their decision-making process hinders human trust required for emergency response. To address this, we present an explainability framework for understanding flood segmentation and car detection predictions on the widely used PIDNet and YOLO architectures. More specifically, we introduce a novel redistribution strategy that extends Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) explanations for sigmoid-gated element-wise fusion layers. This extension allows LRP relevances to flow through the fusion modules of PIDNet, covering the entire computation graph back to the input image. Furthermore, we apply Prototypical Concept-based Explanations (PCX) to provide both local and global explanations at the concept level, revealing which learned features drive the segmentation and detection of specific disaster semantic classes. Experiments on a publicly available flood dataset show that our framework provides reliable and interpretable explanations while maintaining near real-time inference capabilities, rendering it suitable for deployment on resource-constrained platforms, such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs).

Open-world object detection (OWOD) requires incrementally detecting known categories while reliably identifying unknown objects. Existing methods primarily focus on improving unknown recall, yet overlook interpretability, often leading to known-unknown confusion and reduced prediction reliability. This paper aims to make the entire OWOD framework interpretable, enabling the detector to truly "knowing the unknown". To this end, we propose a concept-driven InterPretable OWOD framework(IPOW) by introducing a Concept Decomposition Model (CDM) for OWOD, which explicitly decomposes the coupled RoI features in Faster R-CNN into discriminative, shared, and background concepts. Discriminative concepts identify the most discriminative features to enlarge the distances between known categories, while shared and background concepts, due to their strong generalization ability, can be readily transferred to detect unknown categories. Leveraging the interpretable framework, we identify that known-unknown confusion arises when unknown objects fall into the discriminative space of known classes. To address this, we propose Concept-Guided Rectification (CGR) to further resolve such confusion. Extensive experiments show that IPOW significantly improves unknown recall while mitigating confusion, and provides concept-level interpretability for both known and unknown predictions.