Improved kinematic interpolation for AIS trajectory reconstruction

Abstract Ship trajectory information has made a significant contribution to the data-based research in analyzing maritime transportation and has facilitated the improvement of maritime safety. However, the AIS data, which consists of ship trajectory, inevitably contains noises or missing data that can interfere with the conclusion. In this paper, an improved kinematic interpolation is presented for AIS trajectory reconstruction, which integrates data preprocessing and interpolation that considers the ships' kinematic information. The improved kinematic reconstruction method includes four steps: (1) data preprocessing, (2) analysis of time interval distribution, (3) abnormal data detection and removal, (4) kinematic interpolation that takes the kinematic feature of ships (i.e., velocity and acceleration) into account, adding forward and backward track points to help correct the acceleration function of reconstruction points. The proposed method is tested on the AIS dataset of Zhoushan Port and was compared with traditional ship trajectory reconstruction methods. The comparison indicates that the proposed method can effectively reconstruct the ship trajectory with higher performance on a single ship trajectory and a large AIS data set of certain water areas.