A novel ship trajectory reconstruction approach based on low-rank tensor completion

Abstract

The Automatic Identification System (AIS) enhances maritime safety and environmental monitoring by providing crucial ship trajectory data. However, this data is often compromised by missing or abnormal values due to signal blockage, transmission errors, and equipment failures, jeopardizing safety and the accuracy of environmental analyses. Addressing these challenges, we propose a novel Customized Tensor-Based Maritime Trajectory Reconstruction (CTMTR) framework that leverages the self-similarity of ship trajectories to reformulate trajectory reconstruction as a matrix rank minimization issue. The CTMTR framework consists of three steps: data preprocessing, trajectory matrix construction, and trajectory reconstruction. We conducted simulation experiments using a dataset comprising vessel trajectories from the east coast of Dover in the United States in 2022. To validate its effectiveness, the CTMTR is compared with four advanced methods (LRMC, LRTC-TNN, TRPCA, and TNN-DCT) under diverse missing and anomalous scenarios. The results substantiate that the performance of CTMTR outperforms other approaches, especially in anomalous cases. Our method outperforms existing methods by an order of magnitude under random missing combined with anomaly scenarios. The CTMTR framework thus has the potential to advance maritime trajectory reconstruction methodologies, providing a solid foundation for future innovations in maritime data analysis and navigation safety technologies.