Maritime Traffic Data Visualization: A Brief Review

The sustainability development of ocean engineering has witnessed the vigorous maritime activities in different waters. The rapidly increased maritime traffic contributes to the high-level accidental risk of maritime transportation. To better monitor the maritime traffic, it is necessary to deeply understand the massive vessel traffic data from different perspectives in practical applications. The advanced data visualization techniques can help us to gain deep insights into maritime traffic behavior from massive vessel traffic data. Data visualization performs well in generating visual presentation of information, which has become a powerful and widely-used tool for the analysis and interpretation of large amounts of complex big data. The primary objective of this paper is to provide a brief review for interested researchers to better understand the maritime traffic data visualization techniques. Within this brief review, data visualization techniques in the fields of spatio-temporal vessel trajectories and vessel traffic density have been comprehensively surveyed. Owing to the significant advantages of visualization techniques, there is a huge potential to utilize these techniques to assist in enhancing vessel traffic safety and service reliability in maritime activities.