Semantic Segmentation of AIS Trajectories for Detecting Complete Fishing Activities

Detection of fishing activities in trajectory data is important for authorities to develop fishery management policies and combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing at sea. However, the complex movement patterns of fishing activities challenge existing trajectory segmentation approaches, which may not identify complete fishing activities. In light of this, we propose a window-based trajectory segmentation algorithm which aims to detect fishing activities as completely as possible. Firstly, we introduce a visualization-based technique TPoSTE to help design features characterizing different movement patterns. Secondly, a window-based segmentation algorithm WBS-RLE is proposed to split a trajectory into fishing and non-fishing segments. WBS-RLE first utilizes a pre-trained classifier to label windows in a trajectory as fishing or non-fishing, then it uses the run-length encoding technique to merge those labeled windows into complete fishing activities. The effectiveness of our approach and its advantages over existing approaches are evaluated on a real-world trajectory dataset.