Mining spatial–temporal motion pattern for vessel recognition

Approaches of vessel recognition are mostly accomplished by sensing targets and extracting target features, without taking advantage of spatial and temporal motion features. With maritime situation management systems widely applied, vessels’ spatial and temporal state information can be obtained by many kinds of distributed sensors, which is easy to achieve long-time accumulation but are often forgotten in databases. In order to get valuable information from large-scale stored trajectories for unknown vessel recognition, a spatial and temporal constrained trajectory similarity model and a mining algorithm based on spatial and temporal constrained trajectory similarity are proposed in this article by searching trajectories with similar motion features. Based on the idea of finding matching points between trajectories, baseline matching points are first defined to provide time reference for trajectories at different time, then the almost matching points are obtained by setting the spatial and temporal constraints, and the similarity of pairwise almost matching points is defined, which derives the spatial and temporal similarity of trajectories. By searching the matching points from trajectories, the similar motion pattern is extracted. Experiments on real data sets show that the proposed algorithm is useful for similar moving behavior mining from historic trajectories, which can strengthen motion feature with the length increases, and the support for vessel with unknown property is larger than other models.