PESO: A Seq2Seq-Based Vessel Trajectory Prediction Method with Parallel Encoders and Ship-Oriented Decoder

Vessel trajectory prediction supports navigation services and collision detection. To maintain safety and efficiency in maritime transportation, vessel trajectory prediction is always an important topic. By using automatic identification system (AIS) data and deep learning methods, the task of vessel trajectory prediction has made significant progress. However, this task is still full of challenges due to the complexity of historical information dependencies and the strong influence of spatial correlations. In this paper, we introduce a novel deep learning model, PESO, based on the structure of Seq2Seq, consisting of Parallel Encoders and a Ship-Oriented Decoder. The Parallel Encoders, including the Location Encoder and the Sailing Status Encoder are designed to integrate more information into feature representation. The Ship-Oriented Decoder is targeted to utilize the Semantic Location Vector (SLV) to guide the prediction, which better represents the spatial correlation of historical track points. In order to verify the efficiency and efficacy of PESO, we conducted comparative experiments with several baseline models. The experimental results demonstrate that PESO is superior to them both quantitatively and qualitatively.