Visual Analysis of Vessel Behaviour Based on Trajectory Data: A Case Study of the Yangtze River Estuary

Abstract

The widespread of shipborne Automatic Identification System (AIS) equipment will continue to produce a large amount of spatiotemporal trajectory data. In order to explore and understand the hidden behaviour patterns in the data, an interactive visual analysis method combining multiple views is proposed. The method mainly includes four parts: using a trajectory compression algorithm that takes into account the vessel motion characteristics to preprocess the vessel trajectory data; displaying and replaying vessel trajectories based on Electronic Chart System (ECS), and proposing a detection algorithm for vessel stay points based on the principle of spatiotemporal density to semantically label vessel trajectories; using the Fast Dynamic Time Warping (FastDTW) similarity measurement algorithm and the Ordering Points to Identify the Clustering Structure (OPTICS) clustering algorithm to cluster vessel trajectories to show the differences and similarities between vessel traffic flows; and showing the distribution of vessels and the variation trend of vessel density based on the vessel heatmap. Based on the AIS data of the Yangtze River Estuary, three cases are used to prove the usefulness and effectiveness of the system in vessel behaviour analysis.