Spatiotemporal Companion Pattern (STCP) Mining of Ships Based on Trajectory Features

Abstract

Spatiotemporal companion pattern (STCP) mining is one of the means to identify and detect group behavioral activities. To detect the spatiotemporal traveling pattern of ships from massive spatiotemporal trajectory data and to understand the movement law of group ships, this article proposes a feature-driven approach for STCP mining that consists of (1) generating the grid index via the rasterizing of geospace and characterizing trajectory points via the spatiotemporal trajectory grid sequences (STTGSs) of ships; (2) designing filtering rules with the constraints of range, time and distance to construct a candidate set for ship STCP mining; and (3) measuring the STTGS similarity of the associated ships and setting the confidence threshold to realize spatiotemporal companion mining. The effectiveness of the proposed method is practically validated on a real trajectory dataset which is collected from the Taiwan Strait waters. The experimental results are as follows: 825 pairs of associated ships and 225 pairs of accompanying ships are mined when the grid size is 0.05° and the confidence is 0.5. Larger grid sizes can increase the inclusiveness of the associated ship trajectory similarity measurement, which can result in an increase in confidence of pattern. A large number of pseudo-accompaniment ships are extracted to the result set, resulting in a more dispersed distribution of pattern confidence. By verifying the proposed method, accompanying behavioral activities such as ship cooperative operation, companion navigation method, and so on, can be detected. These results can provide a reference for the research of ship group behavior identification and have an important application value for water transportation management.