biSAMNet: A Novel Approach in Maritime Data Completion Using Deep Learning and NLP Techniques

Abstract

In the extensive monitoring of maritime traffic, maritime management frequently encounters incomplete automatic identification system (AIS) data. This deficiency poses significant challenges to safety management, requiring effective methods to infer corresponding ship information. We tackle this issue using a classification approach. Due to the absence of a fixed road network at sea unlike on land, raw trajectories are difficult to convert and cannot be directly fed into neural networks. We devised a latitude–longitude gridding encoding strategy capable of transforming continuous latitude–longitude data into discrete grid points. Simultaneously, we employed a compression algorithm to further extract significant grid points, thereby shortening the encoding sequence. Utilizing natural language processing techniques, we integrate the Word2vec word embedding approach with our novel biLSTM self-attention chunk-max pooling net (biSAMNet) model, enhancing the classification of vessel trajectories. This method classifies targets into ship types and ship lengths within static information. Employing the Taiwan Strait as a case study and benchmarking against CNN, RNN, and methods based on the attention mechanism, our findings underscore our model’s superiority. The biSAMNet achieves an impressive trajectory classification F1 score of 0.94 in the ship category dataset using only five-dimensional word embeddings. Additionally, through ablation experiments, the effectiveness of the Word2vec pre-trained embedding layer is highlighted. This study introduces a novel method for handling ship trajectory data, addressing the challenge of obtaining ship static information when AIS data are unreliable.