Many-target, Many-sensor Ship Tracking and Classification

Abstract

Government agencies such as DARPA wish to know the numbers, locations, tracks, and types of vessels moving through strategically important regions of the ocean. We implement a multiple hypothesis testing algorithm to simultaneously track dozens of ships with longitude and latitude data from many sensors, then use a combination of behavioral fingerprinting and deep learning techniques to classify each vessel by type. The number of targets is unknown a priori. We achieve both high track purity and high classification accuracy on several datasets.