A Heterogeneous Information Fusion Method for Maritime Radar and AIS Based on D-S Evidence Theory

Maritime radar and automatic identification systems (AIS), which are essential auxiliary equipment for navigation safety in the shipping industry, have played significant roles in maritime safety supervision. However, in practical applications, the information obtained by a single device is limited, and it is necessary to integrate the information of maritime radar and AIS messages to achieve better recognition effects. In this study, the D-S evidence theory is used to fusion the two kinds of heterogeneous information: maritime radar images and AIS messages. Firstly, the radar image and AIS message are processed to get the targets of interest in the same coordinate system. Then, the coordinate position and heading of targets are chosen as the indicators for judging target similarity. Finally, a piece of D-S evidence theory based on the information fusion method is proposed to match the radar target and the AIS target of the same ship. Particularly, the effectiveness of the proposed method has been validated and evaluated through several experiments, which proves that such a method is practical in maritime safety supervision.