Hierarchical Two-Stage Framework for Environment-Aware Long-Horizon Vessel Trajectory Prediction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hierarchical two-stage framework for long-horizon vessel trajectory prediction that integrates environmental factors and localized dynamics, significantly improving accuracy over existing methods.

Contribution

The novel hierarchical fusion mechanism combines a long-term navigational encoder with a grid-aware short-term predictor, incorporating oceanographic data for enhanced prediction accuracy.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art by 25% in ADE

Achieves 17% improvement in FDE

Validates each component through ablation studies

Abstract

Long-horizon vessel trajectory forecasting under real ocean conditions is critical for collision avoidance, traffic management, and route planning. However, achieving accurate predictions is challenging due to long-range temporal dependencies and dynamic environmental factors such as currents, wind, and waves. To address these issues, we propose a hierarchical two-stage framework that combines a coarse long-term predictor with a grid-aware short-term predictor through a hierarchical fusion mechanism. The short-term branch leverages a Spatio-Temporal Graph Transformer on discretized maritime cells to capture localized dynamics, while the long-term branch encodes overarching navigational intent. An integrated environmental module incorporates oceanographic parameters, including surface currents, wind vectors, and significant wave height, using cross-modal attention and feature-wise modulation for adaptive response to varying sea conditions. Additionally, a learnable Savitzky-Golay smoothing layer enhances temporal coherence in fused trajectories. We evaluate our approach on Australian Craft Tracking System (CTS) data from the North West region, aligned with Copernicus Marine Service products, using a 3-hour input and a 10-hour prediction horizon. Experimental results show that our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art by 25% in Average Displacement Error (ADE) and 17% in Final Displacement Error (FDE). Ablation studies further validate the contribution of each component.