A Novel Adaptive Visual Analytics Framework for Multiship Encounter Identification

The automatic identification of multiship encounter is a vital criterion for ship collision avoidance and intelligent maritime safety surveillance. However, the parameters of ship encounter identification in the existing studies are fixed, and the methods are weak to give an automatic and visual performance in the multiship encounter identification. In order to fix the existed gap, this paper proposed a novel adaptive visual analytics framework for automatic multiship encounter identification based on density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) and visual analytics by adjusting the parameters of ship encounter adaptively. The DBSCAN clustering method was applied to detect the clusters of encounter ships and filter out the nonencounter ship, and the distribution and density of the encounter ship had been visualized on the nautical chart to give a better perception of ships’ behavior with a potentially high navigational risk. The framework had been designed and developed using DBSCAN and visual analytics, and the effectiveness was evaluated and validated by adjusting different parameters of multiship encounter within the Southwest waters of Zhoushan Island, China. The results showed that the proposed framework had a good performance in the visual identification of multiship encounter within confined waters, which could assist the ship collision avoidance and intelligent maritime surveillance system.