Machine Learning-Assisted Anomaly Detection in Maritime Navigation Using AIS Data

The automatic identification system (AIS) reports vessels' static and dynamic information, which are essential for maritime traffic situation awareness. However, AIS transponders can be switched off to hide suspicious activities, such as illegal fishing, or piracy. Therefore, this paper uses real world AIS data to analyze the possibility of successful detection of various anomalies in the maritime domain. We propose a multi-class artificial neural network (ANN)-based anomaly detection framework to classify intentional and non-intentional AIS on-off switching anomalies. The multi-class anomaly framework captures AIS message dropouts due to various reasons, e.g., channel effects or intentional one for carrying illegal activities. We extract position, speed, course and timing information from real world AIS data, and use them to train a 2-class (normal and anomaly) and a 3-class (normal, power outage and anomaly) anomaly detection models. Our results show that the models achieve around 99.9% overall accuracy, and are able to classify a test sample in the order of microseconds.