Identifying Behaviours Indicative of Illegal Fishing Activities in Automatic Identification System Data
2025
Yifan Zhou | Richard Davies | James Wright | Stephen Ablett | Simon Maskell
Identifying illegal fishing activities from Automatic Identification System (AIS) data is difficult since AIS messages are broadcast cooperatively, the ship’s master controls the timing, and the content of the transmission and the activities of interest usually occur far away from the shore. This paper presents our work to predict ship types using AIS data from satellites: in such data, there is a pronounced imbalance between the data for different types of ships, the refresh rate is relatively low, and there is a misreporting of information. To mitigate these issues, our prediction algorithm only uses the sequence of ports the ships visited, as inferred from the positions reported in AIS messages. Experiments involving multiple machine learning algorithms showed that such port visits are informative features when inferring ship type. In particular, this was shown to be the case for the fishing vessels, which is the focus of this paper. We then applied a KD-tree to efficiently identify pairs of ships that are close to one another. As this activity is usually dangerous, multiple occurrences of such encounters that are linked to one ship sensibly motivate extra attention. As a result of applying the analysis approach to a month of AIS data related to a large area in Southeast Asia, we identified 17 cases of potentially illegal behaviours.
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