VesNet: a Vessel Network for Jointly Learning Route Pattern and Future Trajectory

Vessel trajectory prediction is the key to maritime applications such as traffic surveillance, collision avoidance, anomaly detection, etc. Making predictions more precisely requires a better understanding of the moving trend for a particular vessel since the movement is affected by multiple factors like marine environment, vessel type, and vessel behavior. In this paper, we propose a model named VesNet, based on the attentional seq2seq framework, to predict vessel future movement sequence by observing the current trajectory. Firstly, we extract the route patterns from the raw AIS data during preprocessing. Then, we design a multi-task learning structure to learn how to implement route pattern classification and vessel trajectory prediction simultaneously. By comparing with representative baseline models, we find that our VesNet has the best performance in terms of long-term prediction precision. Additionally, VesNet can recognize the route pattern by capturing the implicit moving characteristics. The experimental results prove that the proposed multi-task learning assists the vessel trajectory prediction mission.