A Direction-Preserved Vessel Trajectory Compression Algorithm Based on Open Window

Abstract

Ship trajectory data can be used in most marine-related research, and most ship trajectory data come from AIS. The large number of ships and the short reporting period of AIS have resulted in a huge amount of ship trajectory data, which has caused a certain amount of pressure on the relevant research. This paper proposes a direction-preserved vessel trajectory compression method based on Open Window, which can effectively retain the direction change feature points while ensuring the position error. In addition, the method can work in both offline and online modes. Also, the velocity threshold and low-speed redundancy points problems are considered. In order to verify the effect of the proposed method and the adaptability of the method to different feature data, a parallel experiment was performed on port water and coastal water datasets. The results show that our method can compress vessel trajectories while retaining the feature points. Meanwhile, by comparing it with the compression method that is based on distance thresholds, the vessel trajectory compress time is drastically reduced by up to 87.3% in the port water data. The research in this paper provides a new method through which to compress vessel trajectories for research in marine-related fields on vessel trajectory.