Vessel trajectory prediction based on spatio-temporal graph convolutional network for complex and crowded sea areas

Abstract

In order to improve the navigation ability of vessels and ensure the safety of maritime traffic, vessel trajectory prediction plays a crucial role in the intelligent navigation and collision avoidance. Especially for complex and crowded waters, autonomous vessels must have high situational awareness to detect other vessels, and predict their future trajectories and assess collision risks. In this work, a deep attention-aware spatio-temporal graph convolutional network based on AIS data (DAA-SGCN) is proposed to predict the future trajectories of vessels. It mainly includes three modules: motion information encoding of vessel trajectories, the spatio-temporal feature extraction module and the trajectory prediction module. The LSTM is used to extract the motion features of vessels, the spatio-temporal graph is constructed based on deep attention mechanism. The spatial social interaction features are extracted by ST-GCN, and the temporal correlation are extracted by RT-CNN, to obtain the high-level spatio-temporal features of vessel trajectories. Then, the feature embedding is fed into the trajectory prediction module to predict the future trajectories of vessels. On the basis of a large number of experiments, the prediction performance of the DAA-SGCN compared to the optimal baseline model is improved by about 74% and 69% in ADE and FDE metrics.