Deep learning innovations in South Korean maritime navigation: Enhancing vessel trajectories prediction with AIS data

Predicting ship trajectories can effectively forecast navigation trends and enable the orderly management of ships, which holds immense significance for maritime traffic safety. This paper introduces a novel ship trajectory prediction method utilizing Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Deep Neural Network (DNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). Our research comprises two main parts: the first involves preprocessing the large raw AIS dataset to extract features, and the second focuses on trajectory prediction. We emphasize a specialized preprocessing approach tailored for AIS data, including advanced filtering techniques to remove outliers and erroneous data points, and the incorporation of contextual information such as environmental conditions and ship-specific characteristics. Our deep learning models utilize trajectory data sourced from the Automatic Identification System (AIS) to train and learn regular patterns within ship trajectory data, enabling them to predict trajectories for the next hour. Experimental results reveal that CNN has substantially reduced the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Mean Square Error (MSE) of ship trajectory prediction, showcasing superior performance compared to other deep learning algorithms. Additionally, a comparative analysis with other models—Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), GRU, LSTM, and DBS-LSTM—using metrics such as Average Displacement Error (ADE), Final Displacement Error (FDE), and Non-Linear ADE (NL-ADE), demonstrates our method’s robustness and accuracy. Our approach not only cleans the data but also enriches it, providing a robust foundation for subsequent deep learning applications in ship trajectory prediction. This improvement effectively enhances the accuracy of trajectory prediction, promising advancements in maritime traffic safety.