A Hierarchical Spatial-Temporal Embedding Method Based on Enhanced Trajectory Features for Ship Type Classification

Ship type classification is an essential task in maritime navigation domains, contributing to shipping monitoring, analysis, and forecasting. Presently, with the development of ship positioning and monitoring systems, many ship trajectory acquisitions make it possible to classify ships according to their movement pattern. Existing methods of ship classification based on trajectory include classical sequence analysis and deep learning methods. However, the real ship trajectories are unevenly distributed in geographical space, which leads to many problems in inferring the ship movement mode on the original ship trajectory. This paper proposes a hierarchical spatial-temporal embedding method based on enhanced trajectory features for ship type classification. We first preprocess the trajectory and combine the port information to transform the original ship trajectory into the moored records of ships, removing the unevenly distributed points in the trajectory data and enhancing key points’ semantic information. Then, we propose a Hierarchical Spatial-Temporal Embedding Method (Hi-STEM) for ship classification. Hi-STEM maps moored records in the original geographical space into the feature space and can efficiently find the classification plane in the feature space. Experiments are conducted on real-world datasets and compared with several existing methods. The result shows that our approach has high accuracy in ship classification on ship moored records. We make the source code and datasets publicly available.