DBSCAN OPTIMIZATION FOR IMPROVING MARINE TRAJECTORY CLUSTERING AND ANOMALY DETECTION

Abstract. Today maritime transportation represents 90% of international trade volume and there are more than 50,000 vessels sailing the ocean every day. Therefore, reducing maritime transportation security risks by systematically modelling and surveillance should be of high priority in the maritime domain. By statistics, majority of maritime accidents are caused by human error due to fatigue or misjudgment. Auto-vessels equipped with autonomous and semi-autonomous systems can reduce the reliance on human’s intervention, thus make maritime navigation safer. This paper presents a clustering method for route planning and trajectory anomalies detection, which are the essential part of auto-vessel system design and development. In this paper, we present the development of an enhanced density-based spatial clustering (DBSCAN) method that can be applied on historical or real-time Automatic Identification System (AIS) data, so that vessel routes can be modelled, and the trajectories’ anomalies can be detected. The proposed methodology is based on developing an optimized trajectory clustering approach in two stages. Firstly, to increase the attribute dimension of the vessel’s positioning data, therefore other characteristics such as velocity and direction are considered in the clustering process along with geospatial information. Secondly, the DBSCAN clustering model has been enhanced by introducing the Mahalanobis Distance metric considering the correlations of the position cluster points aiming to make the identification process more accurate as well as reducing the computational cost.