Ship Trajectory Prediction Based on Bi-LSTM Using Spectral-Clustered AIS Data

According to the statistics of maritime accidents, most collision accidents have been caused by human factors. In an encounter situation, the prediction of ship’s trajectory is a good way to notice the intention of the other ship. This paper proposes a methodology for predicting the ship’s trajectory that can be used for an intelligent collision avoidance algorithm at sea. To improve the prediction performance, the density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) has been used to recognize the pattern of the ship trajectory. Since the DBSCAN is a clustering algorithm based on the density of data points, it has limitations in clustering the trajectories with nonlinear curves. Thus, we applied the spectral clustering method that can reflect a similarity between individual trajectories. The similarity measured by the longest common subsequence (LCSS) distance. Based on the clustering results, the prediction model of ship trajectory was developed using the bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM). Moreover, the performance of the proposed model was compared with that of the long short-term memory (LSTM) model and the gated recurrent unit (GRU) model. The input data was obtained by preprocessing techniques such as filtering, grouping, and interpolation of the automatic identification system (AIS) data. As a result of the experiment, the prediction accuracy of Bi-LSTM was found to be the highest compared to that of LSTM and GRU.