Unsupervised maritime traffic pattern extraction from spatio-temporal data

Maritime traffic pattern extraction is a fundamental and crucial factor for maritime surveillance and anomaly detection. Emerging technologies like Automatic Identification System (AIS) provides multi-dimensional data which is used to construct a maritime traffic model. In this paper, we propose a framework of maritime traffic pattern extraction from vessel AIS information, which learns a traffic pattern using an unsupervised technique, and can be applied on historical Automatic Identification System data. AIS data is a kind of spatio-temporal data that contains information of location data, as well as time stamps. In this way, traffic pattern is described by AIS data. Furthermore, we conduct a simulation experiment that extracts traffic pattern from the AIS data through the unsupervised technique. The proposed framework takes advantage of AIS data, which is a type of the spatiotemporal data that consists of vessel motion information, to perform the experiment. The result shows that the unsupervised framework converts useful information from raw AIS data to effective traffic pattern. The proposed method strongly supports the further research on maritime traffic pattern extraction of AIS data. Besides, an overview of the framework and the unsupervised technique for high-level maritime situation awareness is presented.