Achieving accurate and efficient ship-type recognition is crucial for the development and management of modern maritime traffic systems. To overcome the limitations of existing methods that rely solely on AIS time series data or navigation trajectory images as single-modal approaches, this study introduces TrackAISNet, a multimodal ship classification model that seamlessly integrates ship trajectory images with AIS time series data for improved performance. The model employs a parallel structure, utilizing a lightweight neural network to extract features from trajectory images, and a specially designed TCN-GA (Temporal Convolutional Network with Global Attention) to capture the temporal dependencies and long-range relationships in the AIS time series data. The extracted image features and temporal features are then fused, and the combined features are fed into a classification network for final classification. We conducted experiments on a self-constructed dataset of variable-length AIS time series data comprising four types of ships. The results show that the proposed model achieved an accuracy of 81.38%, recall of 81.11%, precision of 80.95%, and an F1 score of 81.38%, outperforming the benchmark single-modal algorithms. Additionally, on a publicly available dataset containing three types of fishing vessel operations, the model demonstrated improvements in accuracy, recall, and F1 scores by 5.5%, 4.88%, and 5.88%, respectively.
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