Physics-Guided Anomalous Trajectory Detection: Technical Report

Abstract

Given ship trajectory data for a region, this paper proposes a physics-guided approach to detect anomalous trajectories. This problem is important for detection of illegal fishing or cargo transfer, which cause environmental and societal damage. This problem is challenging due to the presence of gaps in trajectories. Current state-of-the-art approaches either ignore the gaps or fill them using simple linear interpolation, which underestimates the ship’s possible locations during the gap. This paper proposes a novel physics-guided gap-aware anomaly detection test that incorporates physical constraints using a space-time prism. The proposed approach is evaluated with a case study using Marine Cadastre data of ships traversing in the Aleutian Islands region of Alaska in October 2017. A trajectory that could have traversed a marine protected area is correctly flagged by the proposed approach for investigation.