A Multiscale Anomaly Detection Framework for AIS Trajectories via Heat Graph Laplacian Diffusion

The monitoring of abnormal ship behavior is an important task for maritime surveillance for which the automatic identification system (AIS) has been widely exploited. Several works have proposed graph-based anomaly detection (AD) methods on spatial AIS points to provide further information regarding the interactions between the observed data through graph structures. This paper studies a new AD framework on graphs constructed from AIS trajectories. This framework considers a diffusion kernel at multiple scales of the graph Laplacian matrix, referred to as multiscale AD for AIS trajectories (MAD-AIS). MAD-AIS builds an attributed graph from a set of AIS trajectories, where nodes encode spatio-temporal trajectories and edges connect them via a similarity measure. In a second stage, AD is performed by computing scaled versions of the graph Laplacian matrix that are used to assess the graph connectivity. Simulation results are first conducted on synthetic data with controlled ground truth showing that the proposed MAD-AIS can effectively detect the abnormal behavior of ships in terms of spatio-temporal irregularities. Simulations conducted on real AIS subtrajectories (i.e., segments of AIS trajectories) show that abnormal features/attributes can be localized along AIS paths.