A Study on the Geometric and Kinematic Descriptors of Trajectories in the Classification of Ship Types

The classification of ships based on their trajectory descriptors is a common practice that is helpful in various contexts, such as maritime security and traffic management. For the most part, the descriptors are either geometric, which capture the shape of a ship’s trajectory, or kinematic, which capture the motion properties of a ship’s movement. Understanding the implications of the type of descriptor that is used in classification is important for feature engineering and model interpretation. However, this matter has not yet been deeply studied. This article contributes to feature engineering within this field by introducing proper similarity measures between the descriptors and defining sound benchmark classifiers, based on which we compared the predictive performance of geometric and kinematic descriptors. The performance profiles of geometric and kinematic descriptors, along with several standard tools in interpretable machine learning, helped us to provide an account of how different ships differ in movement. Our results indicated that the predictive performance of geometric and kinematic descriptors varied greatly, depending on the classification problem at hand. We also showed that the movement of certain ship classes solely differed geometrically while some other classes differed kinematically and that this difference could be formulated in simple terms. On the other hand, the movement characteristics of some other ship classes could not be delineated along these lines and were more complicated to express. Finally, this study verified the conjecture that the geometric–kinematic taxonomy could be further developed as a tool for more accessible feature selection.