Interaction-Aware Short-Term Marine Vessel Trajectory Prediction With Deep Generative Models

Navigation safety is of paramount importance in areas with heavy and complex maritime traffic. Any ship navigating such a scenario should be able to foresee the future positions of other ships and adjust its path accordingly to avoid collisions. However, predicting future trajectories is a very challenging problem due to many possible future trajectories from the inherent uncertainty and the complex interaction dynamics between different ships. In this article, we propose a deep generative model based on the conditional variational autoencoder framework to learn marine vessel movement and predict future trajectories. The model is able to produce a multimodal probability distribution over future trajectories and model the complex interactions between vessels. Experiments are performed in two-vessel encounter scenarios from real-world automatic identification system data. The proposed model outperforms the baseline methods, including both kinematics-based and data-driven methods. The trajectories predicted by the proposed model are also analyzed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the model.