RETAD: Vehicle Trajectory Anomaly Detection Based on Reconstruction Error

Due to the rapid advancement of wireless sensor and location technologies, a large amount of mobile agent trajectory data has become available. Intelligent city systems and video surveillance all benefit from trajectory anomaly detection. The authors propose an unsupervised reconstruction error-based trajectory anomaly detection (RETAD) method for vehicles to address the issues of conventional anomaly detection, which include difficulty extracting features, are susceptible to overfitting, and have a poor anomaly detection effect. RETAD reconstructs the original vehicle trajectories through an autoencoder based on recurrent neural networks. The model obtains moving patterns of normal trajectories by eliminating the gap between the reconstruction results and the initial inputs. Anomalous trajectories are defined as those with a reconstruction error larger than anomaly threshold. Experimental results demonstrate that the effectiveness of RETAD in detecting anomalies is superior to traditional distance-based, density-based, and machine learning classification algorithms on multiple metrics.