An Algorithm for Interpolating Ship Motion Vectors

Abstract

Interpolation of ship motion vectors is able to be used for estimating the lost ship AIS dynamic information, which is important for replaying marine accidents and for analysing marine traffic data. The previous methods can only interpolate ship's position, while not including ship's course and speed. In this paper, vector function is used to express the relationship between the ship's time and space coordinates, and the tangent of the vector function and its change rate are able to express physical characteristics of ship's course, speed and acceleration. The given AIS dynamic information can be applied to calculate the parameters of ship's vector function and then the interpolation model for ship motion vectors is developed to estimate the lost ship dynamic information at any given moment. Experiment results show that the ship motion vector function is able to depict the characteristics of ship motions accurately and the model can estimate not only the ship's position but also ship's course and speed at any given moment with limited differences.

Keywords

• Ship Motion
• Ship Motion Vector
• Automatic Identification System (AIS)
• AIS Dynamic Information
• Algorithm
• Ship's Acceleration
• AIS Data
• Vector Function