*2.1. The Real-Life Visual Navigation Dataset for the Planetary Rovers*

The visual navigation dataset of the planetary rovers used in this research is part1 and part2 of the *Katwijk* beach planetary rover dataset [49] from the European Space Agency (ESA) [50–53], which contains 2250 frames of the image. The *Katwijk* dataset is a professional open dataset for the navigation vision of the planetary rover research, and many studies use the *Katwijk* dataset as the planetary environment [44,52,54]. The *Katwijk* dataset is achieved at the site where is near the heavy-duty planetary rover (HDPR) platform project of the European Space and Technology Research Center [49].

The reasons for adopting the *Katwijk* dataset are as follows: (i) The focus of this research is to integrate a real-time and E2E rock segmentation framework into the navigation vision of planetary rovers. Thus, a navigation vision stream for evaluating the real-time performance is essential. (ii) The *Katwijk* dataset involves all relevant landmarks supported in the research of Ono et al. [28]. (iii) Other datasets are not suitable for this research. For example, [54] involves some targets that are less likely to appear in planetary exploration (such as the tree, wall, and people). (iv) Other datasets (such as NASA raw images [55]) contain many different types of rock samples, introducing a more complex marginal probability distribution (this research utilizes the concept about task, domain, and marginal probability distribution from [56] as the fundaments). However, rock diversity (or even new rocks [38]) is not the focus of this research but an entirely new discipline.
