Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) fishing aggravates the global crisis caused by overfishing, threatening the sustainability of marine ecosystems and fisheries worldwide. Distinctive operational characteristics of fishing vessels result in unique footprints on marine environments and socio-economic structures, depending on their fishing method and gear type such as trawlers with non-selective gear that disrupts the seabed, purse seiners using Fish Aggregating Devices (FADs), and longliners notorious for high bycatch rates. As these vessels play an essential role in commercial fishing and the industry, effective monitoring, regulation, and enforcement are critical to mitigate the devastating consequences of overfishing and promote sustainable fishing practices. To this end, this paper introduces a novel multi-stage method for Gear type Identification by Spatiotemporal trajectory Transformation (GIST). This method proposes a data-centric approach that employs domain knowledge to facilitate the deployment of an efficient and accurate analysis of operational patterns of fishing vessels derived from Automatic Identification System (AIS) data. Our method first extracts fishing patterns from vessel trajectories to refine data integrity and isolate only the most relevant activities, thereby ensuring a more accurate result. Next, it encapsulates the distributional insights of fishing activities into fixed-sized "images" as actionable input for a multi-class CNN-based classifier. Utilizing GIST bypasses complicated linear analyses of time series data for rendering lengthy trajectories, advancing an efficient gear type identification with 97% accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, GIST is the first to use a multi-stage method to distinguish three principal gear types widely used globally. Our experiments confirm GIST's practicability and effectiveness, marking a significant advancement towards stricter enforcement of regulations in the fight against IUU fishing.

Tracking fishing vessels individually plays a pivotal role in fisheries monitoring, control, and surveillance. Fishing trip is the most appropriate granularity level to study routine fishing activity patterns. Since self-reported information about fishing vessel trips is notoriously unreliable, we propose here TripTracker, an unsupervised learning approach to partition raw trajectories of ships and boats engaging in fishing into trips and identify trip types. TripTracker first partitions a fishing trip into micro-activities, then uses cluster analysis to confirm the microactivity type. Next, it employs multiple Hidden Markov Models to partition the trip into segments, each of which representing a routine activity. Finally, TripTracker utilizes maritime contextual information to differentiate various fishing trip types, revealing actionable knowledge about vessel activities and their operations. Our experimental evaluation on a large real-world fishing vessel trajectory dataset, confirms TripTracker’s practicability and effectiveness for enhancing maritime domain awareness.

The impact of marine life on the oceans of our planet is undeniable and overfishing is a serious threat to marine ecosystems worldwide. Maritime domain awareness calls for continuous monitoring and tracking of fisheries using data from maritime intelligence sources to detect illegal fishing activities. Marine traffic data from vessel tracking services is a promising source for identifying, locating, and capturing vessel information. Given the volume of such data, manual processing is impossible, raising an immediate need for autonomous and smart systems to follow the footprints of vessels and detect their activity types in near real-time. To achieve this goal, we propose FishNET, a simple yet effective convolutional neural network (CNN) model for vessel trajectory classification. The model is trained using a set of invariant spatiotemporal feature sequences extracted from the behavioral characteristics of vessel movements.

In this paper we propose a data-driven approach to detection and tracking of dark fishing in high-volume marine traffic datasets from vessel tracking services. Dark fishing refers to stealthy fishing operations by vessels trying to hide their illicit activities related to various forms of illegal fishing-one of the most serious threats to world fisheries and fish populations worldwide as well as to global food security. Our approach builds on profiling and ranking fishing vessels by analyzing their routine operations over extended time periods to uncover abnormal activity patterns associated with dark fishing. The focus is on vessel movement patterns rendered as a trajectory with defined starting and endpoints such as ports and known anchorage locations. Specifically, we analyze scenarios where the fishing pattern, with the fishing gear in the water, is obscured in a vessel's reported trip data. Our experimental evaluation, using a large dataset of fishing vessel trajectories from coastal waters of North America, shows the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method in differentiating between suspicious and normal fishing vessels irrespective of the vessel type.

Intelligent monitoring and control of critical infrastructure such as electric power grids, public water utilities and transportation systems produces massive volumes of time series data from heterogeneous sensor networks. Time Series Forecasting (TSF) is essential for system safety and security, and also for improving the efficiency and quality of service delivery. Being highly dependent on various external factors, the observed system behavior is usually stochastic, which makes the next value prediction a tricky and challenging task that usually needs customized methods. In this paper we propose a novel deep learning based framework for time series analysis and prediction by ensembling parametric and nonparametric methods. Our approach takes advantage of extracting features at different time scales, which improves accuracy without compromising reliability in comparison with the state-of-the-art methods. Our experimental evaluation using real-world SCADA data from a municipal water management system shows that our proposed method outperforms the baseline methods evaluated here.

Maritime domain awareness builds on services and systems for interactive situation analysis and decision support to assist marine authorities in their assessment of unfolding situations to determine a response to imminent danger or threats to critical infrastructure or sensitive ecosystems. We propose here a methodical and economically viable approach to systematically develop an advanced situation analysis and decision support framework using formal engineering methods that facilitate continuous design through experimental analysis and validation of situation analysis process models in a realistic operational context. Striving for scalable and extensible solutions, our framework seamlessly integrates qualitative and quantitative modeling methods. An exploratory executable prototype operating on maritime surveillance data has been developed and is being evaluated, gradually extending the feature scope.

Maritime domain awareness is critical for protecting sea lanes, ports, harbors, offshore structures like oil and gas rigs and other types of critical infrastructure against common threats and illegal activities. Typical examples range from smuggling of drugs and weapons, human trafficking and piracy all the way to terror attacks. Limited surveillance resources constrain maritime domain awareness and compromise full security coverage at all times. This situation calls for innovative intelligent systems for interactive situation analysis to assist marine authorities and security personal in their routine surveillance operations. In this article, we propose a novel situation analysis approach to analyze marine traffic data and differentiate various scenarios of vessel engagement for the purpose of detecting anomalies of interest for marine vessels that operate over some period of time in relative proximity to each other. We consider such scenarios as probabilistic processes and analyze complex vessel trajectories using machine learning to model common patterns. Specifically, we represent patterns as left-to-right Hidden Markov Models and classify them using Support Vector Machines. To differentiate suspicious activities from unobjectionable behavior, we explore fusion of data and information, including kinematic features, geospatial features, contextual information and maritime domain knowledge. Our experimental evaluation shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach using comprehensive real-world vessel tracking data from coastal waters of North America.