Maritime Threat Detection Using Probabilistic Graphical Models

Abstract

Maritime threat detection is a challenging problem because maritime environments can involve a complex combination of concurrent vessel activities, and only a small fraction of these may be irregular, suspicious, or threatening. Previous work on this task has been limited to analyses of single vessels using simple rule-based models that alert watchstanders when a proximity threshold is breached. We claim that Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGMs) can be used to more effectively model complex maritime situations. In this paper, we study the performance of PGMs for detecting (small boat) maritime attacks. We describe three types of PGMs that vary in their representational expressiveness and evaluate them on a threat recognition task using track data obtained from force protection naval exercises involving unmanned sea surface vehicles. We found that the best-performing PGMs can outperform the deployed rule-based approach on these tasks though some PGMs require substantial engineering and are computationally expensive.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2012
Accession Number
ADA559938

Entities

People

  • Bryan Auslander
  • David W. Aha
  • Kalyan M. Gupta

Organizations

  • United States Naval Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy
  • Ground and Sea Platforms

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Artificial Intelligence Software
  • Change Detection
  • Computer Vision
  • Detection
  • Force Protection
  • Hidden Markov Models
  • Homeland Security
  • Machine Learning
  • Markov Models
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Probability
  • Probability Distributions
  • Recognition
  • Security
  • Unmanned Surface Vehicles
  • Vehicles

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Irregular Warfare and Special Operations Cyberspace Operations against Adversarial Threats.
  • Sensor Fusion and Tracking Systems.

Technology Areas

  • Autonomy
  • Autonomy - UAVs