Duong Nguyen

Duong Nguyen, Ronan Fablet

Vessel trajectory prediction plays a pivotal role in numerous maritime applications and services. While the Automatic Identification System (AIS) offers a rich source of information to address this task, forecasting vessel trajectory using AIS data remains challenging, even for modern machine learning techniques, because of the inherent heterogeneous and multimodal nature of motion data. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to tackle these challenges. We introduce a discrete, high-dimensional representation of AIS data and a new loss function designed to explicitly address heterogeneity and multimodality. The proposed model-referred to as TrAISformer-is a modified transformer network that extracts long-term temporal patterns in AIS vessel trajectories in the proposed enriched space to forecast the positions of vessels several hours ahead. We report experimental results on real, publicly available AIS data. TrAISformer significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, with an average prediction performance below 10 nautical miles up to ~10 hours.

Duong Nguyen, Rodolphe Vadaine, Guillaume Hajduch et al.

Representing maritime traffic patterns and detecting anomalies from them are key to vessel monitoring and maritime situational awareness. We propose a novel approach -- referred to as GeoTrackNet -- for maritime anomaly detection from AIS data streams. Our model exploits state-of-the-art neural network schemes to learn a probabilistic representation of AIS tracks and a contrario detection to detect abnormal events. The neural network provides a new means to capture complex and heterogeneous patterns in vessels' behaviours, while the \textit{a contrario} detector takes into account the fact that the learnt distribution may be location-dependent. Experiments on a real AIS dataset comprising more than 4.2 million AIS messages demonstrate the relevance of the proposed method compared with state-of-the-art schemes.