A Method for Clustering and Analyzing Vessel Sailing Routes Efficiently from AIS Data Using Traffic Density Images

A vessel automatic identification system (AIS) provides a large amount of dynamic vessel information over a large coverage area and data volume. The AIS data are a typical type of big geo-data with high dimensionality, large noise, heterogeneous densities, and complex distributions. This poses a challenge for the clustering and analysis of vessel sailing routes. This study proposes an efficient vessel sailing route clustering and analysis method based on AIS data that uses traffic density images to transform the clustering problem of complex AIS trajectories into an image processing problem. First, a traffic density image is constructed based on the statistics of the preprocessed AIS data. Next, the main sea route regions of traffic density images are extracted based on local image features, geometric structures, and spatial features. Finally, the sailing trajectories are clustered using the extracted sailing patterns. Based on actual vessel AIS data, multimethod comparisons and performance analysis experiments are conducted to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. These experimental results reveal that the proposed method displays potential for the clustering task of challenging vessel sailing routes.