A semi-supervised deep learning model for ship encounter situation classification

Abstract

Maritime safety is an important issue for global shipping industries. Currently, most of collision accidents at sea are caused by the misjudgement of the ship’s operators. The deployment of maritime autonomous surface ships (MASS) can greatly reduce ships’ reliance on human operators by using an automated intelligent collision avoidance system to replace human decision-making. To successfully develop such a system, the capability of autonomously identifying other ships and evaluating their associated encountering situation is of paramount importance. In this paper, we aim to identify ships’ encounter situation modes using deep learning methods based upon the Automatic Identification System (AIS) data. First, a segmentation process is developed to divide each ship’s AIS data into different segments that contain only one encounter situation mode. This is different to the majority of studies that have proposed encounter situation mode classification using hand-crafted features, which may not reflect the actual ship’s movement states. Furthermore, a number of present classification tasks are conducted using substantial labelled AIS data followed by a supervised training paradigm, which is not applicable to our dataset as it contains a large number of unlabelled AIS data. Therefore, a method called Semi-Supervised Convolutional Encoder–Decoder Network (SCEDN) for ship encounter situation classification based on AIS data is proposed. The structure of the network is not only able to automatically extract features from AIS segments but also share training parameters for the unlabelled data. The SCEDN uses an encoder–decoder convolutional structure with four channels for each segment (distance, speed, Time to the Closed Point of Approach (TCPA) and Distance to the Closed Point of Approach (DCPA)) been developed. The performance of the SCEDN model are evaluated by comparing to several baselines with the experimental results demonstrating a higher accuracy can be achieved by our proposed model.